Ed Hardy - Wear Your Dreams: My Life in Tattoos

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To Francesca, for everything, forever

CONTENTS

My Life in Tattoos

Today there have been nearly one billion Ed Hardy retail items unleashed on an unsuspecting but highly receptive public. That staggering sum makes no more sense to me than it does to you. Its more than T-shirts, hats, and running shoes. Theyve got everything. For a while, there were seventy sublicenses. A licensee sent us a bitchin iPad cover with a leaping koi. There is red wine, white wine, champagne. My designs appeared on everything you can dress yourself with, on cigarette lighters, or air fresheners, you name it. I asked one of our guys just what the fuck does that have to do with air fresheners? Nothing, he said. People like the designs.

The big snarling tiger with the crazy green eyes I first painted in 1968, when I was just starting out doing tattoos in Vancouver. I took it from an old-time tattoo design, which Im sure was taken from a circus poster. The Love Kills Slowly heart and skull design, something I first drew in 1971 at my shop in San Diego, is the most popular. Its like the Ford insignia of the Ed Hardy line.

Im not a public figure. People dont know what I look like and I dont get out and around a lot. I was riding the subway in New York last year and there was a lady with this totally bling Ed Hardy bag. We were jammed up together. When I got off at my stop, I handed her a card and told her, Im Ed Hardy and I really appreciate you supporting the brand. I was in North Carolina for a tattoo convention and the maid came into my room, a young, hip gal with a couple of tattoos. She asked what I was doing in town and I said, tattoo convention. She took a look at me in my plaid shirt and cardigan sweater. Really? she said.

Im a tattooer, I told her. My names Ed Hardy.

She whipped out her cell phone. Wait a minute, wait a minute, she told me, then shouted into her phone, Do you know who Im standing here with? Ed Hardy! I love Ed Hardy.

When he signed me up, Christian Audigier told me they were going to make me a star and I would travel around the world in private jets and limousines and sign autographs for a half hour wherever I went. I told them, in only the nicest possible way, that Id rather they would pay me and leave me alone.

That I became the best-known fashion brand in the world today is beyond laughable. Francesca and I are like the Beverly Hillbillies. All this is so strange to me. Ive had to learn to pay attention. We had to mount a lawsuit to gain back control over the brand, but all that was settled. Today we are partnered with the New York brand management firm Iconix, and things are on a more even keel.

All I ever wanted to do was to make art and be an artist. I didnt want to be judged by the medium of my expression. When I started, nobody thought tattoos were art or that people who did tattoos were artists. Of course, I knew the tattoo shops and the people who tattooed lived in an underground world, but I never thought it wasnt art. When I took this up as a life calling, the so-called world of high art, needless to say, had no idea what to make of tattoo artists. We didnt exist in the world of galleries and museums. I never took that very seriously anyway, except that I didnt want to be viewed as a lesser human being because I didnt paint on canvas. The art world erects these artificial barriers and then gets to say who is an artist and who isnt. With tattoos, you are always going to get that to a degree because its got that loaded thingits on skin and its messyall ink and blood. You have to look at peoples bodies, which pushes all sorts of buttons. And they cant resell it, so they dont know what to do with it.

Today there is more tattooing than any time in history. Tattoos go back as far as civilization. The early Egyptian mummies were tattooed. The Pictish people in preAnglo-Saxon England, where we get the word picture, were all tattooed. Tattoos may have predated cave paintings. I have no idea why people get tattoos. You might as well ask why people make art. The tattoo is a marker of lifes journey. Tattoos are found in all cultures. The Pacific Islands had great tattoo traditions. Sadly, the Judeo-Christian bunch rejected tattoos as pagan markings, which pretty much assured the underground status of the tattoo in the Western world, where its done in sketchy parts of town, by people with strange, noisy machines. When I opened Realistic Tattoo in 1974 in San Francisco, the modern tattoo movement was barely beginning to mass on the horizon.

* * *

I started corresponding with Sailor Jerry, the greatest tattooer of his generation, when I was first working in San Diego in 1969. We traded several letters a week because we had a lot of dead time in shop. We swapped photos of our work, compared notes, delved into aesthetics, techniques, and all aspects of the art of tattooing. We were both pushing epic tattoos, more breakthrough work with an Asian theme. We wrote each other constantly, but we only talked on the phone a couple of times. The first time I put a big tattoo on a woman, Jerry happened to call and ask, What are you doing? I told him I was fixing to put a big Japanese design on a good-looking young ladys back, just to bust his balls, because I knew he would be mad with envy.

She was a hippie chick who had been in my shop before. I remembered her when an old friend from my San Francisco Art Institute days called and said he met a girl in a bar who had some tattoos, which was highly unusual in those days. He was one of my few friends from school who showed any interest in tattoos. He was with me the night I got my second tattoo in Oakland and was wearing a couple of my earliest pieces. He was back in San Francisco after a long time living out of town. At the time, he was a total lush, slamming them back at bars with strangers, and ended up one night taking her home with him. She gave him a dose. God damn it, watch out if she shows up in your place, he said.

She did come back down and turned up at the shop, looking to get another tattoo. She picked something off the wall, but was vague about what she wanted and pretty much left it up to me. I had this design on the wall, sort of a Japanese grim reaper in a large, fluttering robe, brandishing a big Japanese ax. On the ax is the kanji (Japanese symbol) for death. I think maybe it was my idea, a good spot for it. I put it on her inner thigh. I didnt mention what was on the ax. I thought this was appropriatea little warning to those in the know.

A couple of months later, the day Sailor Jerry called, she came back in with a man, a native Japanese. He barely spoke English. He was an architecture student who picked her up hitchhiking in the Haight-Ashbury and she talked him into driving her down to San Diego so she could get a big tattoo. He was more than slightly baffled by the whole thing. In Japan, tattoos are traditionally associated with the yakuza, the criminal underworld, and not something for anyone in polite society. He wore a deer-in-the-headlights expression and who knows what he thought the payoff was. He drove her. He was her patsy.