Question 1

Who is Sailor Jerry?

Accepted Answer

Sailor Jerry was Norman Collins, an American tattooer who ran the busiest tattoo shop in the country from Honolulu's Hotel Street. Born in 1911, he learned hand-poke work as a young train-hopper, then learned the machine from Tatts Thomas of Chicago. During World War II, twelve million servicemen passed through Hawaii, and the line outside his door became the busiest in American tattooing. He fused bold American flash with Japanese composition, built cleaner tools and better pigments, and trained the men who launched the Tattoo Renaissance, including Don Ed Hardy. He worked from 1033 Smith Street in Honolulu and died in 1973.

Question 2

Who is Ed Hardy?

Accepted Answer

Don Ed Hardy is the American tattooer who helped turn tattooing into a recognized art. Born in Des Moines in 1945, he earned a fine arts degree in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967 and turned down a Yale fellowship to tattoo instead. He was mentored by Sailor Jerry Collins, then traveled to Japan to study classical irezumi under the master Horihide. He brought that training home and built the shops, the publishing, and the museum exhibitions that reframed American tattooing as fine art. His shop Tattoo City opened in San Francisco. His name later became a global clothing brand.

Question 3

Who is Horiyoshi III?

Accepted Answer

Horiyoshi III is the most documented living master of traditional Japanese tattooing, or irezumi. He was born Yoshihito Nakano and grew up in Shimada on Shizuoka's Pacific coast. As a boy of about eleven, he saw a yakuza member's full-body irezumi at a public bath and decided that would be his life. Post-war Japan had pushed the art underground, so he taught himself by copying ukiyo-e woodblock prints for years before he ever held a needle. Around 1971 he went to Yokohama to apprentice under the first Horiyoshi, Yoshitsugu Muramatsu, who later bestowed the Horiyoshi name on him.

Question 4

Who was Maud Wagner?

Accepted Answer

Maud Wagner, born Maud Stevens in Emporia, Kansas, in 1877, is the first widely documented female tattoo artist in the United States. She worked the traveling-circus circuit as an aerialist and contortionist. At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair she met Gus Wagner, a heavily tattooed merchant seaman who had learned hand-poke tattooing in Borneo, Java, Australia, and Japan. She traded a date for a tattooing lesson. The lesson became an apprenticeship, the apprenticeship became a marriage in October 1904, and the two toured as a husband-and-wife team. She worked by hand-poke and never adopted the electric machine.

Question 5

Who was the first woman tattoo artist?

Accepted Answer

Maud Wagner is the first widely documented female tattoo artist in the United States. Born Maud Stevens in Kansas in 1877, she was a circus aerialist who met the tattooer Gus Wagner at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, traded a date for a lesson, and married him that October. She tattooed by hand-poke. The story is more layered abroad and earlier on stage. Nora Hildebrandt was billed as the first professional tattooed woman exhibited in the United States in 1882, but she was a display attraction tattooed by her partner, not a working artist. In Britain, Jessie Knight became the first publicly recognized professional female tattooer.

Question 6

Who is Whang-Od?

Accepted Answer

Apo Whang-Od Oggay is the principal living bearer of Butbut Kalinga batok, the hand-tap tattoo tradition of the Cordillera mountains in the northern Philippines. She was born around 1917 in Buscalan, a village in Kalinga Province. Her father, a village mambabatok or hand-tap tattoo master, taught her the method around 1932, when she was about fifteen. She taps pine soot into the skin using a thorn from a calamansi citrus tree as the needle. She has practiced for roughly ninety years and has trained her grand-nieces to carry the tradition forward. The honorific Apo means elder, not a name.

Question 7

Who invented the electric tattoo machine?

Accepted Answer

Samuel F. O'Reilly patented the first electric tattooing machine. Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1854, he ran a Bowery tattoo shop at 5 Chatham Square in New York and won U.S. Patent No. 464,801 on December 8, 1891. His machine adapted Thomas Edison's electric pen, turning the slow hand-poke trade into a powered commercial practice. His apprentice Charlie Wagner improved on the design in 1904 with a vertical-coil machine, and almost every coil tattoo machine built since runs on Wagner's pattern rather than O'Reilly's original rotary.

Question 8

What was the first tattoo shop in the United States?

Accepted Answer

Martin Hildebrandt ran what is documented as probably the first professional tattoo shop in the United States, opened in a tavern off Oak Street in lower Manhattan around 1870 to 1872. Born about 1825 in the German Confederation, he learned tattooing in the US Navy in the 1840s aboard the USS United States. He worked entirely by hand-poke, before the electric machine existed, and built his clientele among Civil War soldiers, moving camp to camp marking troops. His daughter Nora Hildebrandt later toured as a tattooed sideshow attraction.

Question 9

Who was the first professional tattooist in Britain?

Accepted Answer

Sutherland Macdonald is generally accepted as the first identifiable professional tattooist in Britain. Born in Leeds in 1860, he learned tattooing during army service and began working professionally around 1882, marking soldiers near the garrison town of Aldershot. By 1889 he ran a studio inside the London Hammam, a Turkish baths at 76 Jermyn Street in fashionable St James's. In 1894 the Post Office Directory created a tattoo category specifically for him, and he held a British patent for a tattooing machine. His clientele included royalty and high society during the Victorian tattoo fashion.

Question 10

Who was Gus Wagner the tattooed man?

Accepted Answer

Augustus Gus Wagner, born in Marietta, Ohio, in 1872, was a merchant seaman who carried hand tattooing from the Pacific into the American interior. On a world voyage from 1898 to 1902 he learned the hand-poke method from practitioners in Borneo, Java, Australia, and Japan, and came home covered in work. He billed himself as the most artistically marked-up man in America and toured the circus sideshow trade. He trained and married Maud Stevens, who became the first widely documented American female tattoo artist, and the two worked as a husband-and-wife team. He stood apart from the Bowery electric-machine line because he worked by hand.

Question 11

Who is Lyle Tuttle?

Accepted Answer

Lyle Tuttle was an American tattooer who helped bring tattooing into the cultural mainstream. Born in Iowa in 1931 and raised in California, he got his first tattoo at fourteen and came up self-taught in a closed-mouth trade. On July 1, 1960, he opened his San Francisco shop at 30 7th Street, next to the Greyhound station. He tattooed Janis Joplin, Cher, and other figures of the era, and turned the 1961 New York City tattoo ban into national press for the craft. He was also one of the first American tattooers to collect and preserve the trade's history.

Question 12

What is Tahiti Felix's Master Tattoo?

Accepted Answer

Tahiti Felix's Master Tattoo is the oldest tattoo shop in San Diego and the American West, opened by Felix Lynch in the summer of 1949 in the Gaslamp Quarter. Lynch was a Midwest boy who hitched a ride on a merchant ship to French Polynesia, learned the Tahitian language, and married a Tahitian woman named Nui, which earned him the working name Tahiti Felix. He learned to tattoo at the Long Beach Pike under Mac McKeever, then built a Navy-port institution in San Diego. Three generations of the same family have run it, and a second location later opened in Hobart, Tasmania.

Question 13

Who is Mudskipper the tattoo artist?

Accepted Answer

Nicholas Mudskipper Keeping owned Tomb Tattoo in the Gardens neighborhood of Cape Town, South Africa. Before returning home around 2020, he ran a shop in Bangkok, Thailand for close to eight years. He was known for bold traditional tattooing, with heavy readable line work and strong color, and for a deep collection of bootleg toys. He was widely loved in the tattoo community and worked alongside a roster that included Matthew Oldfield, Justus Kotze, Wesley von Blerk, and Bruce the Kid. He died while traveling in the United States, confirmed on June 14, 2024.

Question 14

Who brought traditional Japanese tattooing to Brazil?

Accepted Answer

Ivan Szazi brought authentic traditional Japanese tattooing to Brazil. Before the mid-1990s the Brazilian trade ran on American traditional flash, maritime symbols, and surf-counterculture motifs, with no real classical Japanese body art in South America. Around 1995 Szazi set up a professional workspace in Sao Paulo and aimed his whole career at mastering classical horimono. He built full-back and bodysuit dragons, koi, tigers, shishi lion-dogs, and celestial figures set against dense wind and wave scrolls, working to the strict compositional rules of the tradition. He pulled the local scene past American and tribal styles and seeded a lineage that now reaches London and San Diego.

Question 15

Who brought the first electric tattoo machine to Brazil?

Accepted Answer

Knud Harald Lykke Gregersen, known as Tattoo Lucky, carried the first electric tattoo machine into Brazil. Born in Frederiksberg, Denmark, in 1928, he grew up near the sea and worked as a sailor, picking up the flash vocabulary of anchors and dragons that traveled with deep-water crews. On July 20, 1959, he stepped off a vessel at the Port of Santos in Sao Paulo state carrying a machine from Europe. By the record kept by Brazilian guilds, it was the first electric tattoo machine to work in the country, and the date is now marked locally as the Day of the Professional Practitioner. He worked the shop until his death in 1983.

Question 16

Who was Cap Coleman?

Accepted Answer

August Cap Coleman, born near Cincinnati in 1884, built the Norfolk style of American traditional tattooing. He came up on the carnival circuit as both a tattooed attraction and a working tattooer, which taught him to draw a crowd and work fast. In 1918 he opened a shop on East Main Street in Norfolk, Virginia, beside a major naval base, and tattooed Navy sailors for decades. His style ran on bold lines and heavy color. He mentored Paul Rogers and influenced Sailor Jerry Collins, helping carry the American traditional flash canon forward into the twentieth century.

Question 17

Who was Paul Rogers the tattooer?

Accepted Answer

Franklin Paul Rogers, born in rural western North Carolina in 1905, was an American traditional tattooer and machine builder. He started mill work at thirteen and taught himself to tattoo in 1928 from a kit mail-ordered from E.J. Miller in Norfolk, Virginia. He later trained formally under Cap Coleman in Norfolk from 1945 to 1950, the documented spine of East Coast commercial tattooing. He co-founded the Spaulding and Rogers tattoo supply house and coined the word irons for tattoo machines. He went on to mentor Don Ed Hardy, linking the old commercial trade to the Tattoo Renaissance.

Question 18

Who was Bert Grimm?

Accepted Answer

Bert Grimm, born Edward Cecil Reardon in Springfield, Missouri, in 1900, is called the Grandfather of Old School American tattooing. He ran away to the carnival at fifteen and learned the trade on the circuit, and by sixteen had his own shop on Chicago's South State Street tattoo row. He took a paid apprenticeship in San Diego under Charlie Barrs, whom he credited with teaching him the craft. He tattooed for sixty-nine years, from Chicago to St. Louis to the Long Beach Pike in California. His flash is still a template for American traditional work, and three of his shops remain open. Young Don Ed Hardy hung around his Long Beach shop.

Question 19

Who was Charlie Wagner?

Accepted Answer

Charlie Wagner, born Karl Wiegner in Austria-Hungary in 1875, ruled New York's Chatham Square and the Bowery for half a century. He trained as a machinist before he ever picked up a needle, then apprenticed under Samuel O'Reilly in the early 1890s. On April 19, 1904, he patented the vertical-coil tattoo machine, U.S. Patent No. 768,413. O'Reilly's earlier 1891 machine had been a rotary, but almost every coil machine built since runs on Wagner's design. Known as the King of the Bowery Tattooers, he tattooed many sideshow figures, including Betty Broadbent and Mildred Hull.

Question 20

Who was the first woman to own a tattoo shop on the Bowery?

Accepted Answer

Mildred Millie Hull was the first woman to run her own tattoo shop on the New York Bowery. Born in New York in 1897, she left school early to join the traveling shows, dancing burlesque and showing off her body as a tattooed attraction. That was the usual ceiling for a tattooed woman of her generation, but Hull went further. She was tattooed by Charlie Wagner, the King of the Bowery Tattooers at 11 Chatham Square, then learned the trade and opened her own shop. She broke the pattern that kept most tattooed women on the sideshow stage rather than behind the needle.

Question 21

Who was the first African-American woman to own a tattoo shop?

Accepted Answer

Jacci Gresham is the first known African-American woman to own and run a tattoo shop in the United States. Born in Flint, Michigan, in 1951, she studied architecture and engineering and drafted automobile-dealership layouts for General Motors in Detroit until a mid-1970s layoff. In 1976 she opened Aart Accent Tattoos in New Orleans with Ajit Singh, who taught her the trade. She has credited her drafting background for her clean line work, her layout sense, and her eye for proportion. Her New Orleans shop made her a pioneering figure for women and for Black artists in the American trade.

Question 22

Who was Betty Broadbent?

Accepted Answer

Betty Broadbent, born Sue Lillian Brown in Florida in 1909, was one of the most famous tattooed ladies of the American sideshow era. Beginning in 1926, she had a full bodysuit applied at Charlie Wagner's shop at 11 Chatham Square in New York. She debuted with Ringling Brothers in 1927 at about seventeen and toured the American midway for forty years, reaching the 1939 World's Fair. In 1981 she became the first inductee into the National Tattoo Association's Hall of Fame. She was a tattooed performer rather than a tattooist, part of the display tradition that ran alongside the working trade.

Question 23

Who was Artoria Gibbons?

Accepted Answer

Artoria Gibbons, born Anna Mae Burlingston in Linwood, Wisconsin, in 1893, was the highest-paid tattooed lady of the 1920s. She married the tattooer Charles Red Gibbons around 1912, took her stage name, and spent the rest of her working life as a tattooed sideshow attraction. Her husband applied her entire body suit. As she put it plainly, my husband done every one of them. She carried that work across the country for more than thirty-five years, touring the largest American circuses, including Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey. She is one of the defining figures of the tattooed-lady tradition.

Question 24

Who founded the Horiyoshi lineage?

Accepted Answer

Shodai Horiyoshi, born Yoshitsugu Muramatsu, founded the Horiyoshi lineage, the best-known named line in modern Japanese tattooing. He worked tebori, the traditional hand-insertion method, in Yokohama from about the 1930s into the mid-1970s. His own birth and death dates are not confirmed in available English sources, so the man behind the title stays thinly documented, but the line he founded became famous. Over a roughly ten-year apprenticeship he trained Yoshihito Nakano, and in 1971 he bestowed the Horiyoshi name on him as Horiyoshi III, who became the most documented living master of the tradition.

Question 25

Who is Horihide and why does he matter?

Accepted Answer

Horihide is Kazuo Oguri, a tattooer in Gifu City, central Japan, whose career ran more than sixty years from around the 1950s. He trained for five years in Tokyo under Hideo Murai, the Tokyo Horihide, learning tebori, the traditional hand-poke method, before taking the Horihide name in his home city. He matters because of who he wrote to. In the 1960s his correspondence with Sailor Jerry Collins, and his later connection to Don Ed Hardy, opened the channel through which classical Japanese irezumi crossed to America. He is often called Gifu Horihide to separate him from others who carried similar names.

Question 26

Who was George Burchett, the King of Tattooists?

Accepted Answer

George Burchett, born George Burchett-Davis in Brighton, England, in 1872, was the most famous British tattooist of the Edwardian and mid-century years. He learned the electric machine from Sutherland Macdonald, Britain's first professional tattooist, and ran parlors on Waterloo Road and Mile End Road in London. He worked from the 1890s until his death in 1953, a career of roughly six decades. He tattooed European royalty and high-society clients, which earned him the nickname King of Tattooists. He sits in the British lineage between the Victorian pioneers and the modern trade.

Question 27

What is China Sea Tattoo Company?

Accepted Answer

China Sea Tattoo Company is the Honolulu shop that preserved Sailor Jerry's legacy. When Norman Sailor Jerry Collins died on June 12, 1973, his Chinatown shop at 1033 Smith Street passed to Mike Malone, who tattooed as Rollo Banks. Malone renamed it China Sea Tattoo Company and ran it for roughly twenty-five years. He guarded Collins's flash and stencils, acting as the working bridge between the old Hotel Street trade and modern American tattooing. The shop kept the Sailor Jerry tradition alive at the same Smith Street address through the Tattoo Renaissance.

Question 28

Who is Henk Schiffmacher, Hanky Panky?

Accepted Answer

Henk Schiffmacher, known as Hanky Panky, is a Dutch tattooer who helped shape modern European tattooing. He first walked into Tattoo Peter's basement studio in Amsterdam with a camera and came out drawn to the trade. Self-taught, he opened his Hanky Panky shop in Amsterdam's red-light district around 1979. He built the world's largest tattoo museum and published 1000 Tattoos, a reference book that landed in shops across the continent. He worked within the international network of the Tattoo Renaissance alongside figures like Don Ed Hardy, Sailor Jerry's legacy, and Horiyoshi III.

Question 29

Who is Filip Leu?

Accepted Answer

Filip Leu is a Swiss-based tattooer known for full Japanese-style bodysuits built to a master standard. Born in Paris in 1967, he was raised on the road by his tattooing parents, Felix and Loretta Leu, traveling through America, North Africa, India, and Nepal. He gave his first tattoo at fourteen and joined the family studio near Lausanne, called Family Iron, in 1986. He proved that a Western artist could build full irezumi-style bodysuits to the standard of the Japanese masters, and he sits in the global tradition alongside Horiyoshi III, Don Ed Hardy, and Hanky Panky.

Question 30

Who is Keone Nunes?

Accepted Answer

Keone Nunes, born in 1957, is the central figure in the revival of Hawaiian kakau uhi, the customary hand-tapped skin marking of the Hawaiian Islands. He spent the 1970s and 1980s researching Hawaiian culture, then learned the traditional techniques in the early 1990s, with the technical chain coming through Samoa and the Sulu'ape family. He brought the work out of commercial tattoo shops and back into sacred, communal practice, reviving the bone-and-wood uhi tools and natural pigments. As a kahuna ka kakau he has trained the apprentices who now carry the Hawaiian lineage forward.

Question 31

Who is Su'a Sulu'ape Petelo?

Accepted Answer

Su'a Sulu'ape Alaiva'a Petelo is a senior tufuga ta tatau, a master tattooist of the hereditary Sa Su'a line on Upolu, Samoa. The title is conferred within the extended family and is never self-assumed; a young man earns it across years as an assistant who stretches skin and prepares pigment before he is handed the comb and striker. In 1985 Petelo carried Samoan tatau onto the international tattoo-convention circuit in Rome. After his brother Paulo II was killed in 1999, he became the senior authority of the Sulu'ape family, stewarding the traditional Samoan pe'a and helping connect the Pacific tradition to the wider world.

Question 32

Who was Cliff Raven?

Accepted Answer

Cliff Raven, born Clifford Ingram in Indiana in 1932, was an American tattooer who helped pioneer the move into Japanese-style work. Unusual for his era, he came to tattooing with a fine-art degree from Indiana University rather than a sailor's background. His first professional tattoos came from Phil Sparrow, the working name of literature professor Samuel Steward, who pushed him toward Japanese designs. Raven worked from Chicago Tattooing Company on Belmont Avenue and later the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, buying Lyle Tuttle's Sunset shop. Alongside Sailor Jerry and Don Ed Hardy, he was part of the American turn toward Japanese aesthetics, and he trained Pat Fish.

Question 33

Who was the first publicly recognized female tattooer in Britain?

Accepted Answer

Jessie Knight was the first publicly recognized professional female tattooer in the United Kingdom. Born Jessie Marjorie Knight in Croydon in 1904, she was one of eight children in a family that moved between maritime trades and circus performance. Her father, a sailor who learned to tattoo at sea, also ran a sharp-shooting act in which she served as his target. She took up the family tattoo trade at his Barry shop in 1921, aged eighteen. Across four decades in British garrison and port towns she built her reputation, anchored by a result in a 1955 national tattoo competition.

Question 34

Who was Christian Warlich?

Accepted Answer

Christian Warlich was a German tattooer called the King of Tattooists in his home country. Born in 1891 in Hannover-Linden, he was working the needle by the early 1910s. Around 1919 to 1921 he set up the shop that made him, a tattoo studio run out of the back room of a pub in Hamburg's St. Pauli district, the dockside quarter off the Reeperbahn where sailors came ashore. He is credited with introducing the electric tattoo machine to Germany. He drew flash that sailors crossed the North Sea for, and he corresponded with Norman Collins, Sailor Jerry, on pigment and design.

Question 35

Who is Horitomo?

Accepted Answer

Horitomo is Kazuaki Kitamura, a Japanese tattooer born in Mie Prefecture in 1971. He first learned Western-style tattooing from Sabado in Nagoya in 1992. In May 2001 he moved to Yokohama to study traditional irezumi under Horiyoshi III, who gave him the name Horitomo. He has worked at State of Grace in San Jose, California, since 2007, making him part of the American anchor of the Yokohama lineage. He is widely known for his Monmon Cats artwork, which renders classical irezumi motifs on cats, and for his deep study of tebori, the traditional hand method.

Question 36

What is Into You London?

Accepted Answer

Into You was a custom tattoo and piercing studio in London that helped define British blackwork and dotwork. It opened in October 1993 at 144 St John Street in Clerkenwell, founded by the tattooer Alex Binnie and the piercer Teena Marie. For twenty-three years it served as a hub for blackwork, dotwork, and neo-tribal-adjacent work, with Tomas Tomas on its later roster. It was a key node in London's custom-tattoo scene and influenced a generation of geometric and blackwork artists before it closed in October 2016.

Question 37

Who was Bernie Luther, the Vienna tattooer?

Accepted Answer

Bernie Luther was born in 1965 in Vienna, Austria, and came to tattooing through the punk scene. He built his first tattoo machine at 16 and opened Tattoo Demon in 1987, widely described as the oldest tattoo studio still operating in the city. It sits at Turnergasse 15 in the 15th district. He is known for freehand work, drawing designs straight onto the skin instead of using stencils. From 1994 he co-owned a second shop in Bali for about ten years. He also paints, photographs, and makes gig posters, and gathered his work into a book titled Tattoo Demon.

Question 38

Who was El Socio, the Tepito tattooer?

Accepted Answer

El Socio was Jose Luis Zuniga Jaramillo, a tattooer from Guadalajara who built his name in the Tepito neighborhood of Mexico City. Sources tied to his archive say he became the first tattooer in Mexico to obtain government permission to operate a venue, dated to 1984, though that superlative rests largely on his own account. He set up a registered, permitted studio called Arte del Barrio in a barrio that rarely dealt in legal things. In 1995 he published Tatuajes Arte Marginado, reported as the first Spanish language tattoo book of its kind in Latin America. He died in November 2023.

Question 39

Who was the first tattooer in Mexico to get a government permit?

Accepted Answer

By his own account and the archive built around him, El Socio, Jose Luis Zuniga Jaramillo, became the first tattooer in Mexico to obtain government permission to operate a tattoo venue, dated to 1984 in Mexico City. Some sources instead point to a State of Jalisco provisional permit for his shop Arte del Barrio in 1983, or a Federal District registration in 1991. The exact street and date disagree across sources, so the claim is best read as reported rather than settled. What holds up is that he ran a permitted, registered shop in Tepito years before the city built any framework for the trade.

Question 40

Who was Tito el Colombiano, the prison tattooer?

Accepted Answer

Tito el Colombiano was Roberto Candia Salazar, who reportedly arrived in Mexico from Colombia as a child and learned to tattoo inside Lecumberri prison in Mexico City in the early 1970s. He built machines from a recorder motor, syringe parts, and guitar string sharpened into needles, and made pigment from soot scraped off burned plastic and wood. He returned to custody at Reclusorio Norte in 1989 and kept tattooing there. After his release around 2011 he worked Mexico City streets and a stand at the La Raza tianguis, and was later received as a master of the old school, called don Tito.

Question 41

How were tattoos made in Mexican prisons in the 1970s?

Accepted Answer

Accounts of Tito el Colombiano describe the method used inside Lecumberri prison. Machines were built from scavenged parts, a small recorder motor, the metal fitting from a glass syringe, pen tubes, cables, and guitar string sharpened into needles, powered off the prison wiring. Pigment came from soot. Inmates burned plastic combs and wood, scraped the black residue with a razor blade, then mixed it with water, shampoo, and toothpaste. The tattoos requested were specific to the setting, often a mother's name, the hands of forgiveness, or the face of Jesus Christ, carried on skin as record and protection.

Question 42

Who was Nicholas Mudskipper Keeping?

Accepted Answer

Nicholas Mudskipper Keeping owned Tomb Tattoo in the Gardens neighbourhood of Cape Town, South Africa, at Unit 16, Gardens Business Village on Wandel Street. Before Cape Town he tattooed in Bangkok, Thailand, reportedly for close to eight years, returning home around 2020. His work leaned traditional, with heavy readable line work and strong colour. He was a serious collector of vintage Japanese toys and bootleg figures, and trained jiu-jitsu at Renzo Gracie Cape Town. He died while travelling in the United States, with the news confirmed on 14 June 2024.

Question 43

Who was Tahiti Felix Lynch, the San Diego tattooer?

Accepted Answer

Felix Lynch was a Midwest boy who hitched a ride on a merchant ship to French Polynesia, learned the Tahitian language, married a Tahitian woman named Nui, and came home with the working name Tahiti Felix. He learned to tattoo at the Long Beach Pike under Mac McKeever, then in summer 1949 opened Tahiti Felix's Master Tattoo Parlor at 317 F Street in San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter. The shop drew sailors and Marines from the Navy and Marine port for decades. His sons carried the Tahiti prefix forward, and the shop is described as the oldest family-owned tattoo parlor in the American West.

Question 44

Is there a Tahiti Felix's Master Tattoo in Australia?

Accepted Answer

Yes. A Hobart, Tasmania branch opened in 2012, carrying the name of the San Diego shop founded by Tahiti Felix Lynch in 1949. It sits at Shop 1, 55 Elizabeth Street Mall in the central business district. According to the shop, a tattooer it calls Tahiti Gil was invited to guest in Hobart, then partnered as creative director to convert a studio formerly called Hellfire Tattoo into the Australian branch. It markets itself as the second-oldest operating parlour by name, though that rests on the 1949 San Diego date, not a 1949 start in Hobart. The Hobart trading history under this name dates to 2012.

Question 45

Who was Lew Alberts, Lew the Jew?

Accepted Answer

Lew Alberts was born Albert Morton Kurzman in New York City in 1880, the son of German Jewish immigrants. He trained in vocational drawing and worked as a wallpaper designer, which shaped his clean bold outline style. After getting tattooed in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, he returned to New York around 1902 as Lew the Jew Alberts and worked Chatham Square and the Bowery alongside Charlie Wagner. Around 1905 he became the first tattooer to design and sell printed flash sheets, helping Americanize the sailor tattoo and build the American Traditional canon.

Question 46

Who was the first tattooer to sell printed flash sheets?

Accepted Answer

Lew Alberts, known as Lew the Jew, is credited as the first tattooer to design and sell printed flash sheets, around 1905. Born Albert Morton Kurzman in New York City in 1880, he had trained as a wallpaper designer, work built on pattern, repetition, and clean bold outline. He pointed that skill at tattoo design while working the Bowery and Chatham Square beside Charlie Wagner. Selling standardized printed designs spread a shared visual vocabulary across shops and helped lock in the American Traditional canon of bold readable images.

Question 47

Who founded the Horiuno tattoo line in Japan?

Accepted Answer

Horiuno I, born Kamei Unosuke in the Kanda district of Edo in 1843, founded the three-generation Horiuno line of Tokyo horishi. He took up tattooing around the age of twenty and worked full time into his seventies, dying in 1927. His clientele came largely from the construction and manufacturing laborers of Kanda, men who carried their full body horimono publicly during the Asakusa Sanja Matsuri festival. His Kanda clients formed the friendship and pilgrimage group that became the Edo Choyukai, one of Japan's oldest documented societies of tattooed people.

Question 48

Who was Hori Chiyo and why could he only tattoo foreigners?

Accepted Answer

Hori Chiyo worked Yokohama from the late 1880s into the 1900s, when the Meiji government banned irezumi for Japanese subjects but left foreign visitors exempt. The 1872 prohibition was a petty-offences matter of fines and brief jail, and it reached only Japanese citizens, so Yokohama and Kobe masters who could not legally tattoo their own countrymen worked above ground on Westerners. That exemption made Hori Chiyo the most internationally documented Japanese tattooer of the suppression interval. He marked Russian, Austrian, and American clients, including visiting sailors, officers, and traveling aristocrats.

Question 49

Who is Horitoshi I?

Accepted Answer

Horitoshi I is a Tokyo horishi, a traditional tattooer, and founder of the Horitoshi Family, one of the better documented contemporary tebori lineages in Japan. Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, he came to Tokyo at fifteen and began studying irezumi seriously around twenty-one. By his own account there was no formal master at the start. A friend who had taken up the work helped him, and he practiced on his own skin until the lines came right. It took roughly ten years before he could support himself as a tattooer. His house grew to around seventeen apprentices, with a son working as Horitoshi II.

Question 50

Who was the first known African-American woman to own a tattoo shop?

Accepted Answer

Jacci Gresham is recognized as the first known African-American woman to own and run a tattoo shop in the United States. Born in Flint, Michigan, in 1951, she studied architecture and engineering and drafted automobile dealership layouts for General Motors in Detroit until a mid-1970s layoff. In 1976 she opened Aart Accent Tattoos in New Orleans with Ajit Singh, an engineer who taught her the trade. She has long credited her drafting background for her line work, her layout sense, and her eye for proportion on the body.

Question 51

Who was Mildred Hull, the Bowery tattooer?

Accepted Answer

Mildred Millie Hull was born in New York in 1897 and joined traveling shows in her teens, dancing burlesque and showing off her body as a tattooed attraction. She was covered by Charlie Wagner, the King of the Bowery Tattooers, who put more than three hundred tattoos on her through the mid-1920s. Rather than stay a sideshow canvas, she learned the trade and became the first woman to run her own tattoo shop on the New York Bowery, at 16 Bowery near Chatham Square. A painting by Ace Harlyn of Wagner tattooing her still carries their working relationship.

Question 52

Who was Irene Woodward, the Original Tattooed Lady?

Accepted Answer

Irene Woodward was born Ida Levina Lisk in Philadelphia in 1857 and reinvented herself as a tattooed performer billed as The Original Tattooed Lady. After a March 1882 reception at the Sinclair House in New York City, she debuted at Bunnell's Dime Museum on the Bowery, performed as La Belle Irene, and later toured Europe with P.T. Barnum. Who actually tattooed her is genuinely uncertain. Later accounts name Samuel O'Reilly and Charlie Wagner, but both attributions carry a chronology problem, since Wagner was only about seven at her 1882 debut, so the original tattooist is best treated as unknown.

Question 53

Who was the first professional tattooed woman exhibited in the United States?

Accepted Answer

Nora Hildebrandt debuted at George B. Bunnell's New American Museum in New York City on or about March 1, 1882, billed as the first professional tattooed woman exhibited in the United States. Her body was hand-poked by Martin Hildebrandt, the German-born sailor-tattooer regarded as America's first permanent professional, before the electric machine existed. Show literature called Martin her father, sometimes her husband, but the scholarly consensus holds the two were common-law partners only, never legally married and not related by blood. Her birthplace and year remain disputed across the secondary record.

Question 54

Who was Emma de Burgh, the tattooed circus performer?

Accepted Answer

Emma de Burgh was half of one of the earliest celebrated husband and wife tattooed acts. She married Frank de Burgh in 1885 in Burlington, Iowa, and toured the late nineteenth century circus circuit. The couple went to New York City and contracted with Samuel O'Reilly for extensive body suits. Her upper back carried a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. Because O'Reilly was still working out the electric machine he would patent in 1891, a large share of the de Burghs' early work was applied by hand with traditional needles rather than by the powered machine.

Question 55

Who was Jessie Knight, the British tattooer?

Accepted Answer

Jessie Marjorie Knight was born in Croydon, South London, in 1904, one of eight children in a family that moved between maritime trades and circus performance. Her father, a sailor who learned to tattoo at sea, opened a tattoo shop in Barry, South Wales. In 1921, aged 18, Knight took up the trade directly from him and later took over the studio. Across four decades in British garrison and port towns she became the first publicly recognised professional female tattooer in the United Kingdom, anchored by a 1955 national-competition result.

Question 56

Who is Vyvyn Lazonga, Seattle's First Lady of Tattoo?

Accepted Answer

Vyvyn Lazonga began tattooing in Seattle in 1972 as an apprentice to Danny Danzl at the Seattle Tattoo Emporium. She came up in a craft that was almost entirely men and stayed in it more than fifty years, becoming widely recognized as Seattle's First Lady of Tattoo. In the late 1970s she went to San Francisco and worked alongside Don Ed Hardy, absorbing the new custom tattooing built on full color and on designs drawn for one body. She is counted among the first independent women to own and run a custom tattoo studio in the United States. Her style is colorful, illustrative, and built to follow the body's contours.

Question 57

Who was Amund Dietzel, the tattooer of Milwaukee?

Accepted Answer

Amund Dietzel was born in Kristiania, now Oslo, in 1891 and went to sea as a teenager in the Norwegian merchant fleet, learning to tattoo by marking fellow sailors. In July 1907 the bark Augusta wrecked off the coast of Quebec and he survived, taking work ashore rather than going back to sea. He reached Milwaukee in 1913, found no one tattooing in the city, and stayed. He worked there for roughly fifty-one years across a run of downtown addresses and became, for half a century, the tattooer of Milwaukee.

Question 58

Who was Percy Waters and what did he patent?

Accepted Answer

Percy Waters, born in 1888, ran a large mail-order supply house in Detroit, Michigan, that turned tattooing into a standardized industry. On August 13, 1929, he secured U.S. Patent 1,724,812 for an electromagnetic tattoo machine with a finger-operated toggle switch, the first modern design to carry that convenient switch, and it set the template for how the equipment would be built for decades. His catalogs of flash and supplies reached practitioners worldwide. He tattooed in Anniston, Alabama, before Detroit, left in 1939, and ran the supply business back home until his death in 1952.

Question 59

Who was Milton Zeis and what was his tattoo correspondence course?

Accepted Answer

Milton Zeis was born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1901 and trained in commercial art at the Art Institute in Chicago. For roughly twenty years he ran the Zeis Studio out of his home in Rockford, Illinois, with a supply business on one side and a tattoo shop on the other. From that house he shipped machinery, pigments, and flash sheets across the country. The center of the operation was the Zeis School of Tattooing, a correspondence course first published in 1951. It ran twenty lessons and sold for $125, putting the trade within reach of amateurs by mail.

Question 60

Who was Christian Warlich and what did he bring to Germany?

Accepted Answer

Christian Warlich ran a tattoo studio out of the back room of a pub in Hamburg's St. Pauli harbor district for more than four decades and was called the King of Tattooists. He is credited with introducing the electric tattoo machine to Germany. He drew flash that sailors crossed the North Sea for, and corresponded with Norman Collins, the American tattooer known as Sailor Jerry, on pigment and design. His shop sat at Clemens-Schultz-Strasse 44 from 1919, anchoring the St. Pauli tattoo trade that mentored later figures like Herbert Hoffmann.

Question 61

Who was Herbert Hoffmann?

Accepted Answer

Herbert Hoffmann, born in 1919, ran what is described as the oldest continuously operating tattoo parlor in Germany, in Hamburg's St. Pauli harbor district. He was mentored by Christian Warlich, the St. Pauli master who introduced the electric machine to Germany. Hoffmann was also a documentary photographer. His black-and-white portraits of working-class tattooed people, published in his Motivtafeln, became a sociological record of European tattoo culture, capturing the dockworkers, sailors, and laborers who carried tattoos in the mid twentieth century.

Question 62

Who founded the first tattooists' club in Britain?

Accepted Answer

Les Skuse founded the Bristol Tattoo Club in 1953, the first tattooists' association in Britain. Leslie Skuse was a Bristol tattooer who lived from 1912 to 1973 and learned the trade in 1928 from Joseph Hartley, the only tattooist working in Bristol before him. In 1955 Skuse was voted Champion Tattoo Artist of All England. The club gave British tattooers an organized body and helped knit together a scene that had worked mostly in isolated port and garrison towns.

Question 63

Who was the first tattooer to use an electric machine in Canada?

Accepted Answer

Fred Baldwin is credited as the first tattooer in Canada to use an electric machine, working in 1920s British Columbia. He taught the machine to Forbes Hendry, who worked as Doc Forbes. Doc Forbes built a Navy clientele near the Victoria naval base, then ran one of Vancouver's first stand-alone shops on East Hastings Street. The two form an early documented link in the West Coast Canadian trade, carrying the electric machine into a region whose tattoo demand came largely from sailors.

Question 64

Who carried the first electric tattoo machine into Brazil?

Accepted Answer

Knud Harald Lykke Gregersen, known as Tattoo Lucky, carried the first electric tattoo machine into Brazil. Born in Frederiksberg, Denmark, in 1928, he was a Danish sailor who stepped off a ship at the Port of Santos on July 20, 1959, opened a shop on Rua Joao Otavio, and worked it until his death in 1983. His arrival marks the documented entry point of powered tattooing into Brazil, seeding the local trade in the port city of Santos.

Tatéři a studia

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