My grandfather, a Marine during World War II, returned from service in the Pacific with naked women etched on his Zippo lighter and a pair of bluebirds tattooed on his chest. The exposed beauties received swimsuits some years later, due to my grandmother’s pestering, but the bluebirds remained; reminders of his wartime odyssey and desire to return home safely. I never asked where he acquired his tattoos, but it seems likely they were applied at one of the many parlors located amidst the bars and brothels of Honolulu’s Hotel Street District. For all I know, Norman Keith Collins, A.K.A. “Sailor Jerry,” was responsible for granddad’s bluebirds.
Collins is the subject of a documentary film, Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry, by first-time director Erich Weiss. Four years in the making, the film examines the life, art, and legacy of Collins, who is considered by many as the father of modern American tattooing. A pioneer in the field, Collins was among the first to fuse Asian and western styles, to experiment with new colors, and to implement sterilization techniques shunned by many of his generation.
Born in 1911, Collins left home in his teens to travel the country. A tough kid, he visited America’s industrial cities and ports, drawn to the tattoo parlors located in the shadows of naval bases, slums, penny arcades, and amusement parks. As with many of his generation, he was influenced by Norfolk, Virginia’s August “Cap” Coleman, whose tattoos incorporated bold outlines, black shading, solid colors, and other hallmarks of American style tattooing. Later, Collins settled in Chicago and was introduced to tattoo machines while working for Tatts Thomas, an early Chicago tattoo artist. Collins joined the U.S. Navy shortly thereafter and traveled to Asia, where his lifelong admiration for and study of Japanese tattooing began. By the early 1930s, he had established himself in Hawaii, where he operated tattoo parlors until his death in 1973.
In Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry, Collins’s story, and the story of twentieth-century American tattooing, is primarily told through a series of interviews with Collins’s peers and protégés, including Don Ed Hardy, Lyle Tuttle, Bob Roberts, Mike “Rollo Banks” Malone, Zeke Owen, and Philadelphia Eddie Funk. Industry heavyweights and characters all, they made their bones long before the current “black T-shirt generation” of tattoo artists had dirtied their first diapers. Their interwoven anecdotes provide the layman a framework with which to understand what Don Ed Hardy describes as “a secret world; a really subterranean, outsider kind of art.”
The tattoo industry’s most eloquent ambassador, San Francisco-based artist Don Ed Hardy capably recites the history of tattooing throughout the film, explaining early on that tattoos were a form of individuation for sailors and military men who were otherwise expected to look, act, and live the same as their fellows. Tattoos, he says, are “amuletic,” and people select tattoos in order to assume their characteristics. They are “a distillation of everything dramatic about life.”
