Tim Lehi (Black Heart Tattoo)

Dark American traditional / traditional Japanese hybrid

Black Heart Tattoo, 177 Valencia Street, San Francisco, California

Tim Lehi is an American tattooer, painter, and musician known for dark, large-scale work that fuses American traditional bold line with traditional Japanese structure: tigers, wolves, reapers, dragons, and skulls. He was part of the 2004 opening core of Black Heart Tattoo in San Francisco and later relocated to the Pacific Northwest and then Vermont.

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Archive Note

The son of a fine-art professor, Lehi grew up in Wichita, Kansas, drawing comics and metal-show flyers, taught himself the rudiments of tattooing, and moved through Texas and Arizona before settling in San Francisco in 1997. There he worked and learned alongside Don Ed Hardy and others at Hardy's Tattoo City, and in 2004 he was part of the four-artist opening core of Black Heart Tattoo at 177 Valencia Street in the Mission District, with Scott Sylvia, Jeff Rassier, and Jef Whitehead. He works bold-line American traditional fused with traditional Japanese cloud and water composition in a deliberately dark register, and his published flash and art books include Back in Black, The Tiger Book, and Reapers and Wolves. He later left the Bay Area for Portland, Oregon and then a small town in Vermont, where he continues to paint and publish flash. Earlier notes flagged possible teacher links to Chris Trevino and Richard Stell; these are unconfirmed and not asserted.

Lineage

worked and learned at Tattoo City Don Ed Hardy 1967 CE · Person