Excerpt: Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin

chapter 2

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HARDY, 1963, age 20

while doing the occasional ambitious Japanese-style back tattoo on commission. He flew to Hawaii to meet Jerry, who shared his passion for Japanese tattoos and introduced him to the Japanese tattoo artist Horihide. At the time, he and Jerry were some of the few tattooers doing large-scale work in entire great American tattoo the country. From San Diego, Hardy underwent renaissance began with the a brief apprenticeship with Horihide tattooing career of Ed Hardy. In yakuza in Gifu, Japan. 1967, when he opened his first tattoo studio Returning to the United States, he in Vancouver, tattoos were strictly relegated to a dark, seamy underworld and the only people get- opened Realistic Tattoo Studio in San Francisco ting tattoos were sailors or motorcycle gang mem- in in June, 1974. This was the tattoo parlor of bers. His first professional commission was putting Ed Hardy’s dreams. Appointment only. Straw mats on the floor. No flash on the walls. No neon a Bugs Bunny tattoo on a junkie’s stomach. sign outside reading TATTOOS. Every tattoo Ed Hardy was the exact right person to a unique work of art. His business card said open up the tattoo world. He mixed a childhood “Wear Your Dreams.” fascination and scholar’s instinct in the subject Before Ed Hardy, there was no such with the college-training of an arts professional, thing as tattoo art. Tattoos were a rich, robust folk versed in many mediums and fine art history. At process that had been practiced through the centhe San Francisco Art Institute, an enclave of turies in every corner of civilization, but had gone serous artists such as Joan Brown and Richard Diebenkorn, Hardy earned a fellowship in engrav- completely unrecognized as any kind of art form. American tattoo artists developed an especially ing to the Yale School of Art after graduation, which he rejected in favor of moving to Vancouver powerful style over the course of the 20th century and opening his first tattoo studio, a decision that without any of its skilled practitioners even aspiring to the realms of art. shocked and bewildered his art school associates. Hardy always knew that tattoos were art. As a youth, Ed studied tattoo at the feet of old masters like Bert Grimm, who worked He led the entire tattoo world out of the tawdry underground into the light of day. He established at the Pike in Long Beach, and Sailor Jerry of the first tattoo exhibitions and trade shows. He Honolulu, with whom Hardy carried on years of published magazines and books devoted to the correspondence. After tattooing subject. He pioneered incursions into the most less than a year in the Northwest, he sacred provinces of the art world -- galleries and moved to San Diego, where he stitched military museums. designs on ten thousand Vietnam-era soldiers

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