Wear Your Dreams by Ed Hardy

Author:Ed Hardy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

13.

Reno

The Reno tattoo convention in January 1977 was the first good look we got at how rapidly the tattoo movement was expanding. There had been a small meeting the year before in Houston where about fifty people showed up, but Tattoo ’77 at the Holiday Inn was shaping up to be an entirely different matter right from the start.

The International Tattoo Artists Association started in Europe, with a lot of English members as well as people from around Europe. Once they connected with National Tattoo Supply in Long Island, they cooked up this convention. They were the same people who had circulated the mimeographed newsletters that discovered me in San Diego when I was still working for Doc Webb. We heard about it and knew people would be coming from all over the world, so Mike Malone and I decided to attend and make our presence known.

We reserved a booth in the name of Chuck Eldridge. Nobody in the tattoo world knew him. Malone and I flashed out the booth to look like a classic American tattoo parlor. We built a special dummy rail with a front on it that I painted with a snake twined around the word “Tattoo,” its letters made of branches. On the top rail, we glassed-in a bunch of “hell money,” which the Chinese burn at funerals. Sailor Jerry was fond of the stuff. We had a bunch of bogus bills and fake coins, playing off the luck thing, Reno the gambling town, divorce capital of the world, all that stuff. I stayed in character the whole convention, wearing a green celluloid eyeshade. Every time I was on the convention floor, whenever I walked into the hotel, even if I wasn’t in my booth, I wore the eyeshade. Mike and I painted up some special convention flash. There was a tattooed cobra rising over a pile of money. Gambling images are always good tattoo material—hands of cards, pairs of dice, race horses—and we played that up. The three-day event was a smash. More than two hundred tattooers showed up. People came from all Europe. Tattoo Ole from Denmark had a shop on the harbor in Copenhagen that had been in the same spot for more than a hundred years. George Bone came from London. A lot of the people came through San Francisco first and stopped off at Realistic.

What Sailor Jerry, Malone, and I had done had really hit the tattoo world. I had been tattooing professionally for ten years. The tattoo world was small. They knew about me. They traded photographs of the Japanese-style work I was doing at Realistic. We put quite a buzz through the convention floor simply being there. And we were slammed at the booth, putting on tattoos right and left.

Tattooing was still illegal in New York City, Oklahoma, Indiana, Massachusetts, and several other states. In Florida, it was only allowed with a physician on the premises. The convention barred piercing, although it caused a stink at the time, because

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