| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Tony D'Annessa |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | West 48th Street · Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan |
| Date | 1958 CE |
| Style / Technique | late-1950s NYC American Traditional flash |
| Connected to | NYC Tattoo Ban, Stanley "Bowery Stan" Moskowitz, Thom deVita |
Archive Note
Tony D'Annessa was born in 1935 and reared in Connecticut, then moved to New York City as a young man to study portrait drawing at art school. He had never been inside a tattoo shop. In the summer of 1958 a friend who ran a shop in upstate New York needed a hand, and D'Annessa agreed to fill in. The first walk-in sat down, and D'Annessa tattooed a panther on the man's right bicep. That panther became his signature design, and it still hangs on his shop wall in Montreal.
Later in 1958 he opened his own shop on West 48th Street, in the Hell's Kitchen and Theater District zone of Midtown Manhattan. He worked the American Traditional flash idiom of the late-1950s New York trade. Panthers, eagles, daggers, skulls, roses, pin-ups, and military and nautical motifs in heavy outline and color blocks. The shop ran above-board for about three years.
In 1961 the New York City Department of Health banned commercial tattooing after a hepatitis-B outbreak traced to Coney Island shops. D'Annessa got the letter, and his West 48th Street shop was officially closed. He kept tattooing from the same footprint underground, behind a painted window shade he could pull up speakeasy-style to hide the flash from any inspector who walked in. That shade survived. The New-York Historical Society borrowed it, dated about 1962, for the 2017 exhibition Tattooed New York, where it stood as one of the principal artifacts of the ban-era underground.
The window-shade shop became a bridge. After Willy Moskowitz died in 1961 and the ban closed the family Bowery practice in the same year, his sons Stanley and Walter Moskowitz worked underground in New York alongside D'Annessa for a brief interval, by the Bowery Boogie and Forward accounts, before relocating to Amityville and opening S&W Tattoo by about 1962 to 1963. D'Annessa stayed in the New York underground longer, through the early 1970s. Every comprehensive summary of the 1961 to 1997 ban-era cohort names him in Hell's Kitchen, alongside Brooklyn Blackie in Coney Island and Thom deVita on the Lower East Side. He framed the period plainly. "It became blood money after a while," he said.
The move north was about family, not the trade. In the 1960s he met Lorraine, a Montreal woman visiting New York, and married her. He followed her to Canada in the early 1970s. In 1976 he opened Tatouage Pointe-Saint-Charles, now Point St-Charles Tattoo, on Centre Street in Montreal's Sud-Ouest borough, with his brother-in-law as co-founder. By his own account to CBC News, his was for a time the only tattoo shop open in Montreal, after a shop on Saint-Laurent Boulevard had closed. That single career carried the late-1950s New York flash vocabulary into Quebec and seeded the modern professional trade there.
He never took on a formal apprentice, and he says so on principle. "If you're going to tattoo, you're going to tattoo. There's no way I can teach you how to do that. If you're doing it on the skin, you can't do that and erase it." The closest thing to a transmission was Dave Cummings, who began hanging around Point St-Charles in 1990 and started tattooing there in 1993, a shop-floor relationship D'Annessa declines to call an apprenticeship. He used the same panther and skull designs he started carrying in 1958.
CBC News identified him about 2018, then 83, as Canada's oldest working tattoo artist, after sixty years in the trade. His career runs as one clean line. The 1958 West 48th Street shop, the underground continuation behind the painted shade, the early-1970s move north, and the 1976 Montreal opening that still operates. The canonical spelling of the surname is D'Annessa, double-N and single-S. The variant D'Anessa is a transposition error.