Tattoo Artists Feeling Pinch : Business Plummets as Sailors, Marines Deploy to Mideast

Sailors once chose anchors. Marines opted for bulldogs. And both branches of the armed forces fancied bosomy women.

Today, however, the Grim Reaper has made a comeback in tattoo parlors around San Diego County. Patriotic tattoos have become popular. One sailor, who just returned from the Persian Gulf, created an Operation Desert Shield design--a map of Iraq with a target around it. Another sailor, before shipping out, went with his father and both got matching religious emblems etched in their flesh.

Even so, tattoo parlors are hurting--the unforeseen effect of sending 50,000 San Diego-area sailors and Marines to the Persian Gulf.

Business had already begun to tumble but now it’s tougher than ever, tattoo artists say. In the late ‘70s, almost 20 tattoo parlors dotted downtown San Diego, known as the tattoo capital of the nation. Today, there are two downtown.

As the flood of Marines and sailors slows to a trickle, tattoo artists are welcoming more and more women, as well as increasing numbers of conventioneers, they say.

“Some people are born to want a tattoo. It’s in the blood,” said tattooist Kenny Ho at Tiger Jimmy’s Tattoo Studio on Broadway. “And it’s not like I torture you.”

It looks like torture. At Master Tattoo Studio, also on Broadway, Lefty Al (who declined to give his full name) bent over Rick Stewart’s right shoulder blade, etching a dragon into his flesh with an electric needle.

As pinpricks of blood seeped up through the black ink, Stewart said: “It’s like somebody taking a knife and dragging it across your skin. Does it hurt? Not really.”

But as the wing of the dragon took shape, 19-year-old Stewart reconsidered. “Yes, that hurt.”

Tattoo artists have honed their skills over the years. They no longer work on people who are drunk, believing they bleed more and get sick more frequently. They use sterilized needles. And they design anything from simple hearts to elaborate full-body tapestries.

Freddy Negrete, 34, first learned how to tattoo as a teen-ager in prison for gang-related activities. For most of the past 10 years, Negrete--who sports 54 tattoos over his body--worked designing coffee mugs, key chains and T-shirts.

“But I felt boxed in,” Negrete said. “There’s nothing like tattooing. You are doing something really wild. When you do some serious work on somebody’s body, there’s a lot to it.”

Negrete works at Tattooland on Rosecrans, one of five studios outside the downtown area. Before Operation Desert Shield, about 75% of the clientele were military. Now, that has been almost halved, said his colleague Neil Kotter.

But even before this major deployment, military personnel had begun to move away from tattoos--being a sailor is no longer synonymous with having a dancing woman on biceps, officials say.

“You got out of boot camp and you were away from home, probably for the first time in your life and a tattoo was a way of showing individualism, a way of saying ‘I am my own person,’ ” said Cmdr. Doug Schamp, a Navy public information officer who has a red rose tattooed on his right hip. “But times change. A tattoo was the standard thing; now it’s more earrings.”

Schamp believes one factor may be that sailors can now wear civilian clothing on base--lessening the need for people to distinguish themselves by emblazoning designs on their skin. “It used to be that you were part of a mass all wearing the same clothes and doing the same thing,” he said.

Today, however, tattoos have become more widely accepted in the civilian world and no longer are seen as exclusively the mark of a sailor. Now, college students and adults in their 30s and 40s flock to studios, where small tattoos usually start at about $25.

To accommodate this more diversified clientele, tattoo artists are coming up with larger varieties of designs. One college student recently requested scenes from every war--from the revolution to Vietnam--that had involved Americans. One man had a message to a mortician etched on the sole of his foot: “Dear Mr. Coroner, I think my feet smell fine--how about you?”

Lefty Al, who has plied his trade for 50 years, sighed as he explained, “There is no one popular tattoo anymore--people want weird things now.”

Jason Hicks, a 20-year-old seaman apprentice, selected a bird toting a flower and the inscription of his nickname “Bones.”

“Being an artist like myself, a tattoo brings your inside expressions out to the world,” said Hicks, a Chicago native.

Others, however, made no such lofty claims. Tattoos, some say, are good markers of life changes or emotionally significant events.

“At first, it was rebellion,” said Ted Winters, 25, an unemployed civilian who got his first tattoo seven years ago. But Winters was quickly hit with what is known in the business as “tattoo fever” and he now sports 10 designs.

His most recent addition--comedy and tragedy masks added after his divorce--joined tattoos of a vampire, a dagger piercing a heart, and a winged panther. He scoffs at the more traditional tattoos. “I like stuff that is unordinary like wizards and warriors,” he said. “I didn’t want to get something that shows death. And tigers are ordinary.”

Still others say a little pain is a small price for making a statement. Alfred, a 25-year-old worker in a record shop, had his girlfriend’s name etched in a banner on his left biceps. He decided to get a tattoo as a surprise for her after seeing a photograph of actor Johnny Depp, who has one on his arm.

Alfred requested that his last name not be used because he didn’t intend to tell his parents about the tattoo, which reads: “JUDY FOREVER.”

Asked how he knew the relationship would last as long as the tattoo, Alfred replied: “You have to believe in something.”