Where did american traditional tattooing come from?
American traditional, also called old school or Western traditional, took shape as tattooing moved into full-time shops in the early twentieth century. Electric tattoo machines, developed in the 1890s, made the work faster, and artists bought and sold sheets of ready-made designs called flash. The word came from carnivals of the late 1800s, where tattooers hung eye-catching designs outside their booths.
Flash had to be quick to tattoo and easy to read, so it leaned on black outlines, a few colors and limited shading. August “Cap” Coleman refined designs to be more readable and durable with strong black outlines and black shading, and Milton Zeis sold thousands of flash designs by mail order. Many motifs came from World War II service tattoos: eagles, flags and pin-up girls.
Norman Collins, known as Sailor Jerry, is the name most people know. He learned to tattoo in the late 1920s, served in the Navy, and settled in Honolulu in the 1930s, where he reworked older sailor designs with influence from Japanese tattooing. He developed his own pigments and was among the first to use single-use needles and an autoclave. His protégé Don Ed Hardy later carried Japanese aesthetics and custom design deeper into American work.
How do american traditional tattoos age?
- This is the style that ages best. Bold outlines give the ink room to soften over decades while the design still reads clearly.
- Saturated color held inside thick black borders stays clear for a very long time. Sun is what dulls it fastest, so sunscreen on healed skin pays off.
- Because the designs are simple, a faded traditional piece is easy to refresh: an artist can re-line it and pack the color again without redesigning anything.