Although South California (especially Los Angeles) was already known for black-and-gray prison-style tattooing, in North California, Eddy Reyes Sr popularized Chicano art by mixing aspects of Mexican culture, religion, and history with the street vibe of the West Coast of the United States. His meticulously crafted body art, made with fine-line needles, displays a delicate […]
Category: History
Madame Chinchilla and Mr G: Triangle Tattoo & Museum
Tattoo enthusiasts must visit Triangle Tattoo & Museum in Fort Bragg on the Mendocino County coast of California. Madame Chinchilla and Mr G, tattoo artists, industry historians, and life partners, founded this space in 1986. Both had trained under Bert Rodriguez, a Mexican-American tattoo artist who started a Santa Rosa studio in 1978 and the Tattoos & […]
Shane Tan’s Complete Collection, From Paintings to Japanese Tattoos
Shane Tan, known for his triumph in Japanese-style tattooing, spent seven years developing his self-titled book. Tan’s passion for woodblock print masters is evident in the 448 pages of hand-drawn line drawings, paintings, and tattooing of characters ranging from Tenjiku Tokubei to Nango Rikimaru. Although woodblock imagery has a long history, it flourished as a […]
Upcoming Book Release: Tattoo Master Pinky Yun
Scorpion Front Publishing will print “Tattoo Master Pinky Yun: The Don Ed Hardy Flash Collection” by author and American-Japanese tattooist Takahiro Kitamura in March 2023. The life and work of Pinky Yun, born in Canton, China, on October 29, 1927, are shown on 111 pages in a 90s-style graphic arrangement. Yun moved to Hong Kong […]
Secret Sidewalk Tattoos History and 20th Anniversary
Eddy Reyes Sr was born in 1975 in Pajacuran, Mexico, and immigrated to the Bay Area of northern California, USA, at two years old. He began tattooing at 13 with a handcrafted machine and became a professional in 1995. He planned to utilize tattoos to depict the Bay Area by fusing what he saw on […]
Outer Limits: The United States’ Oldest Tattoo Shop
Kari Barba (1960–) is a distinguished, award-winning tattoo artist with more than four decades of expertise in the industry. She is a co-owner of Outer Limits Tattoo & Museum, the oldest continually functioning tattoo studio in the United States and the second-oldest in the world. This establishment was founded in 1927 by an unidentified person […]