Advertisement

Etched in Skin

Share
TIMES STAFF WRITER

Danny was 14 when he launched his tattoo career.

His tools were a rusty motor rescued from a toy truck and an old ballpoint pen. His customers were friends, acquaintances and anyone brave enough--or foolish enough--to let a kid take a needle to his bare skin.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” said Danny, now 24. “Street people . . . can scar somebody for life.”

Danny said he always had artistic flair and spent about a year tattooing on the street, sometimes tattooing gang members, although he himself was not in a gang.

Advertisement

He finally met a professional tattoo artist who agreed to teach him the trade. He spent the next year learning how to use more sophisticated tattoo machines.

“It was like starting all over again,” he said. “But by doing it every day, I got better and better.”

Danny, who works at Good Time Charlie’s Tattooland in Anaheim (where the motto is, “Have it done right the first time”), finds himself in the ironic position of having to fix bad tattoos that had been done by “scratchers”--people with little or no experience who tattoo out of their homes.

Recently, he was tattooing David Santiago, who six years ago paid a back-yard tattooist $10 to etch a flower on his shoulder. Under Danny’s needle, the flower was slowly blossoming into a tree--at an eventual cost of $300.

Santiago said that as the flower faded and seemed to wilt over the years, he endured laughter and ridicule.

“Looks like your flower needs water,” his buddies would tease.

“When it’s on you, it’s not funny,” he said.

Licensed tattoo parlors in the county say clients such as Santiago represent a flourishing new trade for them: people hoping to cover botched tattoos.

Advertisement

With tattoos back in vogue among rock stars and such celebrities as Cher and Dolly Parton, reputable tattoo shops note that more and more people are tattooing out of their homes for as little as a fourth of the going rate by legitimate artists.

Because scratchers are clandestine, there are no estimates on their number. But tattoo shop owners in the county say up to 50% of their trade is people unhappy with underground tattoo jobs who want them repaired. Ten years ago, they say, there were practically none.

“For every good tattoo artist, there are 10 to 20 scratchers,” said Denise Tibbs, an artist at Laguna Tattoo, one of the county’s four commercial tattoo parlors.

Adding to the demand for cheap tattoos in the county is the proliferation of gang members, who wear the insignia as badges of loyalty.

The number of gangs in the county has more than quadrupled in 10 years, soaring from about 24 gangs with about 2,000 members to more than 100 gangs with about 7,000 members, said Tom Wright, supervisor of the county Probation Department’s gang suppression unit.

The gangs operate in 18 of the county’s 28 cities, from La Habra to San Juan Capistrano, Wright said. About 80% of their members wear tattoos to publicize gang affiliation, he said.

Advertisement

In almost all cases, Wright said, gang members get tattoos from someone working out of a garage or back yard. Many gangs, he added, have a resident tattooist.

But aside from creating ugly memories of a cheap tattoo, health officials say, scratchers pose a health threat. They often use the same needle, encouraging the spread of blood-borne infectious diseases such as hepatitis B, which attacks the liver and is fatal in 2% of the cases.

Just a small number of isolated cases of hepatitis B spread by tattoo needles has been reported in California, although outbreaks in other parts of the country have prompted some bans and restrictions on tattooing.

Today, it takes little more than a small down payment for a scratcher to get into the business.

The amateurs can find supplies through mail-order houses advertising in the back pages of motorcycle and tattoo magazines. One ad, assuring “no talent needed,” offered a “complete” tattoo kit for $89.95.

Other ads promise that the tattooist can go into business for himself, a lure that tattoo industry officials say is in large part responsible for the proliferation of amateurs. They undercut the big tattoo parlors on price, charging as little as $10 for a small tattoo that would cost up to $60 in a professional shop.

Advertisement

Bob MacMahan, a Winchester, Va., supplier and president of the International Tattoo Artists Guild, said the problem of amateur tattooists has become so widespread nationally that many reputable tattoo supply houses are refusing to do business with suspected scratchers.

“I’m concerned about the safety of the public,” said MacMahan, who estimated that he receives up to 25 calls a week from amateurs seeking supplies, in contrast with a decade ago, when he would get “maybe one” call a week.

Eric Spellman, owner of Tattoo Magic in Garden Grove, said most amateur tattooists stay in business only a short time because they have trouble maintaining steady customers and getting refills of ink and needles.

Many amateurs, he added, are not so interested in going into business as just learning enough to tattoo their own friends.

Industry professionals said years of experience are needed to master the intricate art of tattooing. “Anybody who thinks they can draw tries it,” said Mike Barba, owner of Twilight Fantasy Tattoo in Anaheim. “But it’s not like drawing on paper because the skin moves. They might screw it up artistically, like putting one eyeball up and one eyeball down.”

Most professionals working in commercial shops learn the trade under apprenticeships, Barba said, and they spend upward of $1,000 on ink pigments, needles and sterilization equipment.

Advertisement

Some amateurs do not even bother to go through mail-order houses. They simply make their own kits, using such household items as phonograph motors, turntable arms and carpet needles.

“They even do ‘em with ink out of a ballpoint pen and a sewing needle,” said Paul Miller, a California Youth Authority parole agent in Orange County.

Browsing through tattoo designs at Twilight Fantasy Tattoo recently, Scott, 30, a pipe layer from Garden Grove, confided how easy it was for him to get a homemade tattoo while serving time for robbery as a teen-ager in Ventura County Jail.

With tattooing officially forbidden behind bars, Scott said he made ink by collecting soot from some burned plastic spoons, then mixing it with water and shampoo. Then, he said, he took a staple out of a magazine and sharpened it on the ground to make his needle. With needle and ink ready, he had a jail buddy etch his astrological sign, Leo, into his chest.

Now, 13 years later, Scott is ready to mask the tattoo with something more professional, such as a lion.

“It’s too simple,” he complained of his jailhouse tattoo as he and a friend leafed through tattoo designs in the shop. “I’m tired of people asking me if that’s my name.”

Advertisement

While Scott was deciding what new design to cover over his tattoo, Don Phillips, 49, a retired firefighter from Anaheim, was readying for his umpteenth appointment with Kari Barba, 29, wife of the shop’s owner.

Unlike many of the other customers, Phillips said he has never been to an underground tattooist. He got his first tattoo from a professional artist just five years ago. His upper torso has since become a living canvas for a complicated artwork that includes varied wilderness scenes.

“I want high quality,” said Phillips, who has three tattoo sittings per week. “In the first place, you’ve got it for the rest of your life.”

The home sterilization procedure often involves little more than wiping a used needle clean with alcohol. But Dr. Ronald Roberto, chief of disease control for the state health department, said that is not enough to kill the hepatitis B virus. He said the only reliable way to sterilize a needle is to steam-clean it in a device called an autoclave.

The county’s four commercial tattoo parlors not only maintain autoclaves, but also use new needles on each customer. The professional tattooists say they put on latex gloves for protection against disease.

Although county, state and national health officials all warned that dirty tattoo needles could potentially spread acquired immune deficiency syndrome, to date there have been no documented cases.

Advertisement

“The potential is there to spread AIDS, but the probability is not very great,” said Dr. Penny Weismuller, AIDS coordinator for Orange County.

However, county health officials said that, over the years, they have received some hepatitis B cases in which contaminated tattoo needles are suspected of transmitting the infection. But Barbara Peck, a supervising public health nurse for the county, said none of the cases has been successfully traced back to a tattoo needle.

On the state level, Roberto said that “we rarely, rarely” get a report of hepatitis B associated with tattooing, although he still called the use of unsterilized tattoo needles “very risky.”

Hepatitis B outbreaks from tattooing have been reported in New York City, Rhode Island, Florida and Britain, health officials said. As a result, bans on tattooing have been imposed in such places as New York City, Massachusetts, South Carolina, parts of Florida and Virginia.

In California--where tattoo parlors fall under no regulation other than city licensing of commercial parlors--health officials said a similar tattoo prohibition would do little good in controlling the underground tattoo industry.

“You can ban it as a commercial entity,” said Roberto of the state health department, “but what are you going to do about the back yard? Have a helicopter patrolling back yards? It’s very hard to regulate.”

Advertisement

Roberto, instead, advocated public education. In a 1988 column in Tattoo Revue magazine, columnist Linda Finnegan advised “buyer beware” when choosing a tattooist:

“Your hide is precious, so put a little thought into what you plan to put on for life. . . . Only trust a pro. Would you have a tooth pulled by someone who had never been to dentistry school? Then why let a back-room butcher scribble on your skin?”

Advertisement