Written in ink, but erasable

Rick Stratton

An Emmy Award-winning makeup artist for the past 30 years. The last few years, though, he’s designed and applied fake tattoos for movies and television.

“The tattoo thing is partially out of an arthritic problem I have developed over the years in my neck that makes it very painful to do makeup for as many hours as I used to. It was either try to find another job or somehow use what I already know to carve out a niche in our business, so I don’t have to be on set as much.”

Credits: “Death Sentence,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Smokin’ Aces,” the upcoming “Stop Loss.”

Job description: “Sometimes I design the tattoos. In the case of ‘Death Sentence,’ the makeup artist, Rocky Faulkner, did most of the design work. It was his show. I was more or less a manufacturer for that movie. Like a real tattoo artist, where they use a Xerox machine, scissors and a light table, I use scanners and Photoshop and digital photography.

“With ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ the tattoos came into play with the Chinese pirates in the third film. They were trying to come up with a design that was like the sworn oath of the brotherhood of pirates or something like that. It had to have certain insignias they would all have. Ken Diaz, the makeup artist I’ve worked with for years, called me in on that.”

Stats on his own tats: “That is part of how this madness started. I worked on a movie in 1990, a Taylor Hackford film called ‘Blood In Blood Out’ -- it was a Mexican mafia story. Ken Diaz enlisted me in doing tattoos on the show. I only recently started playing around with doing fake ones. Part of my job on that movie was organizing a trailer -- half of us were makeup artists and half were real tattoo artists. That was my first meeting of the real tattooers, and I got to be friends with a couple of them. I respected what they did. I found that a lot of them had similar personalities to the effects makeup artists I knew.

“And so at the end of the show, I talked them into putting a real tattoo on me to cover up a scar. It is like with many things -- they become addictive. That one little tattoo ended up growing and covered my whole ankle area. Every time I learned about a new design, I incorporated it into that tattoo. It started a long road of reading and researching, and 18 years later, I have quite a bit of tattooing. I have been in a couple of magazines and there was a documentary I’m in that they play on the Discovery Channel called ‘Tattoo: Beauty, Art and Pain.’ ”

Application: “My tattoo system kind of came about having done fake tattoos for a long time just as the everyday work of a makeup artist. I had been able to do some really good ones, but consistency was always a problem. It kind of evolved from alcohol transfers that would just transfer the outlines on and you would have to do all the shading and coloring by hand. It’s hard to get that, no matter how good you are, to match perfectly day to day. There was always going to be some kind of variation.

“By designing everything ahead of time in the computer and printing it out multiple times, you can make them look more faded, like real tattoos do after they have healed. The only time you are only going to see a tattoo that’s real crisp is immediately after it’s done, but after the healing process, it changes and breaks down a little bit. With the computer I’m able to get that look.

“I print the image on a special paper in reverse. It’s like a water transfer. It’s like a sophisticated lick-and-stick Cracker Jack technique utilized with modern adhesives I discovered through my prosthetics work, so it is really a micro-thin emulsion of the adhesive the ink has grabbed onto. During the application, I airbrush a special makeup over the top of these and it kind of gives the illusion that it is in the skin and not sitting on the surface.”

Double image: “Another interesting thing I have been doing with tattoos is reproducing actors’ real tattoos for when they have a body double or stunt man. I have done several pictures with the Rock. I have reproduced the big Polynesian-style tattoo that he has. The funny thing is that his cousin is his stunt man -- his cousin has a similar kind of style of tattooing but even more than the Rock has and it’s different. So if I have to do him for his stunts, if the Rock has his shirt off, I have to cover all of the cousin’s real tattoos. You have to paint it all out with a special makeup.”

Background: “I grew up in Burbank and the South Bay. I was always a fan of films and especially horror films. A friend of mine got a job at a place in Glendale called the Don Post Studios [the studio made masks]. He was just a manual laborer doing physical stuff, but he told me about it. I knew of that place because they advertised in all the magazines I had growing up, so I thought maybe I could get a job. They finally gave me a shot learning to airbrush.

“I fell in with a group of people like me who were all movie nerds. I think the first mask I ever made I sold to a TV show at Warner Bros. It introduced me to the makeup department head there. I met John Chambers, who did ‘Planet of the Apes,’ and Fred Phillips, who did the original ‘Outer Limits’ and ‘Star Trek’ series. Guys like that took me under their wing, and I got to be their helper and learned while doing. One thing leads to another and pretty soon you are established in the industry, 30 years later.”

Age: “I just turned 50.”

Union or Guild: Local 706 of IATSE

Resides: Tujunga

-- Susan King