Writing the introduction to Volume One of The Canadian Electric Tattoo Scene was by far the most difficult writing piece in the book. I divided the introduction into parts. It starts with the early sailors and their influence on tattooing in port cities. Next is the carnival and the circus, how they spread tattooing throughout North America, and how conventions and magazines shaped the commercialization of tattooing in Canada.

As far back as we can record, humans have marked themselves. Marking the body defined our cohesive groups. Unified our collective versions of beliefs, social structures, environments that we lived in, or in many cases, how we ornamented ourselves and possibly one of the things we did to pass the time. As our civilizations have evolved and our social structures have changed, so has the way we apply and receive tattoos. Moving from community oriented, or ceremonial formats, to eventually a marketed system of vendor and client scenarios, becoming a business and a means to make a living. For many of us, getting and doing tattoos has become a way of life, and ultimately its own subculture.

The Sailors

The most pronounced and easily documented changes can be found among sailors as far back as the 16th century. Every culture has had its own name for its process of tattooing, such as, Tabori, Tā Moko, hand poking, tapping/rake and strike. However, a definitive terminology wasn’t widely acknowledged or utilized in Western cultures until 1769. Captain James Cook, while sailing through the South Pacific, recorded the Polynesian word “TATAU” meaning “to mark” or “to strike”. Which later evolved to the word “Tattoo”, commonly known today. The word held incredible power and became revered.

Trevor Hodge.
Photo credit: Names Hendo

Sailors have played a significant role in popularizing tattooing as a commercial enterprise. The demand for tattoos by the sailors caused ports around the world to become hotbeds for the development of tattoo culture. When the sailors came home from sea, their fantastical voyages and the stories they shared, became mythologies that were interwoven into popular culture, and the meaning and lore behind tattoos intrinsically flowed into this rich tapestry of experience.

When ships came into port, the sailors would disembark with a great amount of enthusiasm and engage in all kinds of debaucherous activities. While they were out at sea, they would be pent up, and the need for release would be on their minds when their ships returned to land. Family, sex and booze may have made the top of the list, but tattooing was not far behind. The sailors' desire for tattoos helped many early tattoo shops maintain a very steady client base. These shops quickly spread from port cities and found homes near military bases as well. Images used for tattoos were steeped in meanings, traditional beliefs and symbolism. Many of those meanings have stood the test of time and have been carried forward in tattooing today.

Trevor Hodge historical flash sheet.

The images the sailors had tattooed provided a visual language, becoming a quick form of communication for those who understood them. Such as: “A rooster on your knee and you’ll never drown at sea.” It was a symbol of safety for sailors who were out at sea because drowning was a common fear. Chickens were often known to survive shipwrecks because they were in wooden crates that allowed them to float. The designs were basic and were produced with speed of application in mind. Creating a reciprocal relationship between the limited time available during visiting sailors’ shore leave and the greatest financial reward for a responsive tattooist.Quickly, tattooing became connected to leisure based activities. Festivals, fairs, carnivals, circuses, penny arcades and amusement grounds became gathering places for tattoo enthusiasts. This helped create not only a nomadic base for some tattooers but a seasonal transition between various cities. Tattooics could be found for a few days to even months at a time in locations where clients were plentiful. At times, this would cause some proprietors of the craft to establish brick and mortar locations for themselves and even host other travelling tattooists.

The Circus

Circus Leo.
Photo credit: Kobel Barnard.

Under the bright lights of the Big Top, the atmosphere was designed to be electric. Fantastical visuals interwoven with the smells of candy apples, hot dogs, popcorn, and every version of rigged games of chance. Barkers of all ilk shouting advertising pitches for everything from elaborate attractions, freak shows, games, rides, wild animals and tattooing. Tattooists found themselves bustled in amongst all the pageantry that could be poised and draped in rapid succession from town to town in a few mere hours. Inserting tattooing into the carnival spread its roots further into uncharted regions of North America.

Regardless of the benefits it brought to popularizing tattoos in untapped markets, travelling in this way was fraught with troubles. There were social stigmas held by the public toward anything that was connected to the wildness of the carnival. The organization of circuses and similar events was usually made up of many independent contractors centred around entertainment hustlers. Gathering all these unique humans under one tent. In turn, competition complicated these dynamics. Having so many hustlers chasing after the same dollar may seem tough, but it was the relationship with the production's owner that was far more difficult to endure.

Curly Allen business card
Photo credit: Keith Stewart

The owners of these organizations generally worked through pure exploitation, from animals to people. Employees and performers alike were treated as indentured servants, and their contract terms were often horribly imbalanced. Tattooing fell right into the middle of that vaudevillian stage. Though tattooing had grown in popularity, it didn’t necessarily mean that you were in the best circumstances to exploit that popularity. Harsh social stigmas about who adorns themselves with tattoos in various parts of the country sometimes led to a lack of clients who were willing to get tattooed. Economic downturns were felt more quickly and more severely in rural communities, which made up the main market of these travelling Circuses.

Doc Forbes business card
Photo credit: Keith Stewart

Often, tattooists were working in open air environments, with no protection, and the fields hosting the circuses would quickly turn to mud under the crowd's feet. The absence of clean running water or a stable electrical power source could be an absolute disaster. Tattooists had to learn quickly how to be a successful huckster. Hustling became the name of the game, and every concept of how to squeeze the last dime out of a client was applied. Monikers were adopted not only to hide your true identity but also for social reasons or to increase the public’s perception of your skills. Adding “captain”, “doc”, “professor or sailor” greatly added to your validity.

It was truly a feast and famine battle, which would push many tattooists to leave the industry, only to watch other carnival folks quickly take over their place. Equipment would often change hands during difficult times, but when times were good, you would quickly forget that you coasted into town on fumes and had not eaten in days.

The Boom

Despite facing many hardships, economic slowdowns, social criticism and for many years being labelled as an outsider art form tethered to theoretical undesirables, tattooing had gained its foothold across North America. Shops that once would have been unable to survive began to lay deeper and deeper roots in both cities and rural communities across the continent.

Though the number of tattoo shops remained incredibly small, larger cities may have one or two shops, while more rural areas may have only one, which clients would sometimes travel great distances to get their tattoos. However, people still found their way to these businesses, and they prospered. As the industry settled into more stable brick and mortar locations, so did the growth in the industry's supply chain.

Dee Bryant.
Photo credit: Rick Starzyski

As the industry grew, so did a curiosity internally about its own history and growth elsewhere in the world. The concept of varying styles of tattooing or traditions were very apparent to many of those tattooing in Port cities. Sailors and folks with transit schedules that took them out of the country were very quick to share their collections from other countries amongst fellow enthusiasts. As tattooists became more inquisitive about these unfamiliar tattoos from distant locations, they began reaching out to fellow tattooists who had created them. Some of these inquiries found themselves in the East. Contact was usually made through handwritten letters between tattooists and would eventually lead to sharing drawings and photos of work. With these new cross oceanic communications, a combination of ideas, stories, and styles began to slowly influence tattooing in North America. The contact and communication sparked ideas about how tattooing could be rendered in new ways, and opened our minds to new and exciting possibilities. In particular, the large scale work found in Japan became a curiosity amongst North American tattooists.

As these ideas entered the tattooists' lexicon in the 1970s, they began to push the perceived limits of tattooing in the 1960s. The tattooists of the 1970s approached the art of tattooing with a collection of new ideas and higher quality equipment, while holding true to the values that were attributed to the era that they had grown up in, honouring pre-existing tattoo traditions. Amongst these new tattooists would be numerous people with trained art backgrounds. This allowed them to interweave not only the new concepts around large scale work from Japan, but the visual library of the classically trained art world. They had an in-depth understanding of how the body worked, moved and how muscles flowed. In turn, they designed tattoos that not only to compliment the clients form but built on their artistic structure. This raised the bar far higher than anyone had ever thought was even possible prior.

The new generation was eager for access more information on their craft. Grudge based formalities began to falter, and at biker rallies and festivals, tattooists started spending more and more time with each other. These conversations lent to social groups which gradually grew in size. Ultimately, this culminated in some of the first tattoo conventions. Here, tattooists from various cities would bring their clients to claim clout and prizes, share trade secrets, while they revelled in their egos and partied like it was the end of the world.

Tattoo Magazines

Rife with visuals and legendary parties, these conventions quickly pulled media interest. It was not just local media that showed its interest, but more importantly, biker magazines. Unlike local news coverage, these articles took the names of the new generation of tattooists internationally. In 1979, Lou Kimzey and Joe Terasi’s publication Easyrider featured a Tattoo Convention section in issue #72. The issue had such a successful run that by 1981, Tattoos by Easyrider issue #1 made its debut on newsstands and set forth the future of tattoo magazine publications. These were not the first publications to carry coverage of tattoo imagery. Tattooing had actually been heavily documented, but not by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. The media was frenzied about access to anything related to tattooing, but generally did so by severely fetishizing it in the mainstream. So much so that books or magazines with large amounts of tattoo photos would only be available in the “Adult” section of bookstores and newsstands. In 1979, the tattooist and advocate, Spider Webb, published “Spider Webb’s Pushing Ink,” serving as an initial crossing point between the legitimate arts community of New York and the forced underground tattoo world of the city. Spider Webb’s book would set the stage for one of the most influential publications in tattooing history: Ed Hardy’s Tattoo Time in 1982.

Ed Hardy’s Tattoo Time

Hardy, whose first shop was in Vancouver, where he tattooed under the alias Ed Talbot, featured multiple Canadian tattooists in his publication. Doc Forbes, John Van ’T Hullenaar, Paul Jefferies and Bill Baker all graced the pages throughout its run. Tattooing was now moving from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age; this was truly the beginning of a new dawn for tattooing. Though still very small scale, all the foundations had now been laid for the industry's growth in the 1980s. It was now equipped with the building blocks for where tattooing would eventually reach. A new vanguard of tattooists with time honed skills and collections of new, revolutionary ideas towards innovations and design. Armed with higher quality tools, a new sense of community and an eager, growing client base. The winds of change were filling our sails, altering the course of tattooing that was about to unfold over the next couple of decades. As tattooing was gearing up and gaining momentum at an exponential rate, it was far from its peak. In 1980, tattooing was in a much different place than it was just 10 to 20 years prior. However, most tattooists had no idea just how big this “Thing” would get in the following decades. Tattooing still represented free thinking and fast living, and the characters in the business were as colourful as the designs they were applying to the skin.