I am obsessed with tattooing at the moment. Researching and learning everything I can about the history of tattooing. This is the most amazing video I found so far. It started when I was watching a video of a lecture by Don Ed Hardy of my hometown of San Francisco, California, hosted by State of Grace tattoo shop (in San José, California, where my martial arts gym/academy/team is located).
In this lecture on the history of the Black Panther iconography in tattooing, Ed Hardy showed a slide of an art installation he did of a retro Amerikkkan tattoo studio, with a file cabinet, flash art on the walls, and a large shop sponge and old timey metal bucket sitting on the tattooer’s desk. He said it was for the “Sponge & Bucket Method” of tattooing at 35:15.
“Okay, this was a set-up. The Fireworks Vase was done in 2007, which I think was the year that I actually made the vase. This was a show in 2010 at the Laguna Beach Museum, down near where I grew up in southern California. They were doing an “Art Shack” show for the summer and invited all these artists to build their idea of a shack. Like a little studio that you make stuff in. I created a few, a couple of versions of fake little tattoo shops. The first one for Track Sixteen Gallery in LA when I [had] my first show there. So I decided to change this one up and I called it the “Tat Cat Shack,” so it’s all panthers. It was all one theme. And this was, a friend of mine took this, Sharon Marshall, from Costa Mesa. Ace photographer, and took this shot, showing the whole thing with a really super wide range camera. So it’s some of those big, crazy ink drawings of the panthers, but then we hung scrims. I did scans of my old panther stencils from when I was street tattooing and then printed them on these clear mylar sheets. So we had the paintings hung up on the wall and then we had the mylar sheets over them, so you’re looking at them through all these panthers. And then those are proofs in the back area of the big top. The ones on right and left are the big top, the red plate litho, before the stuff was in. Next. This is a scrim with all the panther things. Next.
“This is a close up and I put some of my old. That’s my original power pack on the desk, my Aiko transformer that I bought when I was learning with Phil Sparrow. I had that since ’67 and a bunch of, we set it up with a sponge and bucket. Wanted to really make it like a ’20’s thing. I made scans of some really old tattoo signs that I have from the ’20’s to put in there. But was a cool setup. It was a little 8 by ten inch [foot] thing that you walk into and surrounded by these panthers.”
I was lucky enough to correspond with Ed Hardy’s son, Doug Hardy, who runs the shop, Tattoo City, for his 12-years-retired dad, here in the heavily-Italian North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. I asked Doug what the Sponge & Bucket method was. If it was how tattoo artists wiped off the excess ink before paper towels. He said that it was, but long before even his dad’s time.
Then, I was watching this video, “Tattooing The Way it Was – Monkeys, Blood and Guns” on The Vanishing Tattoo YouTube channel and it featured golden ager, Peter F. a “Tattoo Artist/Executive” in Palm City, Florida at 4:47.
"The tattoo stand was like a wooden platform. There was no running water. There were no toilet facilities, wash basins, or anything else. So you went to the spigot and filled the bucket and you rinsed your tattoo machine in the bucket and you had a sponge. And you wiped off the Vaseline and the ink and the blood that was coming out of the arm and you rinsed the sponge in the bucket. At the end of the evening, and sometimes you kept the place open until there were no more customers. So sometimes it was one o'clock in the morning, sometimes it was two o'clock in the morning. You then took your bucket, and you poured out what now was tar. It was pitch black, a soup of blood, inks, Vaseline, whatever, hairs that had been shaved off. You shaved them and of course, the razor was also rinsed in the bucket and there were always some hairs sticking to the razor. It was a horrible mess. But that's the way the business was done in those days. "