Tattoo artist and author Jonathan Shaw is putting his personal archive of tattoo art and memorabilia on the auction block this Thursday, April 9: Scab Vendor: Rare Tattoo Flash and Underground Art from the Collection of Jonathan Shaw.
Shaw was born in 1953 to the legendary Swing-era big-band leader Artie Shaw and his seventh wife, the actress Doris Dowling. After spending some time in South America as a deckhand, the younger Shaw moved to New York in 1976 and eventually founded Fun City Tattoo (which is now, with different owners, on St. Mark’s Place). As he told interviewer Mark Gottlieb in 2018, “a lot of people don’t know that tattooing was totally illegal in the city of New York back then. It only got legalized in the early ’90s — largely due to the kind of high-profile work I was doing at my Fun City Tattoo studios on St. Marks Place and MacDougal Street, which were Manhattan’s first and only legitimate walk-in tattoo shops back in the day.” In fact, there had been tattooing in the city forever, but it had gone underground in the 1960s because there had been an outbreak of hepatitis B, supposedly traced to some tattoo parlors. Other sources report, however, that the city simply wanted to clean up its image prior to the 1964 World’s Fair, and politicians determined that shuttering such businesses as tattoo parlors and gay bars would make the city more family-friendly for tourists.
Whatever the reason, by the time Shaw started Fun City, the trade was still being carried out in the shadows. As he told Gottlieb, “Everything went on behind closed doors. The handful of professional tattooers who existed back in the day worked by word-of-mouth, or maybe had a few little ads on the back pages of the Village Voice or fliers discreetly passed around in local neighborhood bars and nightclubs, that sort of thing. But there was no real mainstream tattoo culture in New York back then.”
Today, Shaw is widely recognized as an authority on tattoo history. His lifelong preservation of the medium’s material culture is chronicled in his 2017 memoir, Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist. As he told a Reddit book forum nine years ago, “My client list included cops, criminals and captains of Industry, along with many famous names. Names like Johnny Depp, The Cure, The Velvet Underground, The Pogues, The Ramones, Marilyn Manson, Jim Jarmusch, Joe Coleman, Johnny Winter, Kate Moss, and the notorious Great Train Robber, Ronald Biggs — not to mention Tupac Shakur and all his bitches. Even Vanilla Ice was lining up for an appointment — much to my embarrassment — but hey, it was the 90s, right?”
The collection on offer features almost 300 lots, including more than 200 flash sheets from masters like Bert Grimm and Cliff Raven, as well as rare items personally linked to Charles Bukowski, Depp, and R. Crumb. Grimm (born Edward Cecil Reardon, 1900-1985) is often referred to as “the grandfather of old school tattooing,” and one of his hand-painted flash sheets, “As You Are I Was, As I am You Will Be,” features hand-colored borders and such designs as “Cool Stud” and “Nightmare,” which show the artist’s classic, sometimes cartoon-inspired designs.
Iggy Pop once said, “Jonathan Shaw is the great nightmare anti-hero of the new age,” and certainly the tattoo maestro’s collection offers a rich history of early-20th-century tattooing, as well as a chronicle of a true underground cult figure. ❖
Scab Vendor: Rare Tattoo Flash and Underground Art from the Collection of Jonathan Shaw