And those who had heard of Hardy’s designs wanted an Ed Hardy tattoo: bold, traditional American lines and symbols like panthers, eagles, hearts, daggers, skulls.
As it turned out, tattooing being a quintessential act of rebellion, the Japanese youth and Yakuza were much like the hippies and bikers back home who didn’t want the same tattoos that their old man had. There was just one problem: He wasn’t doing quite as many traditional Japanese tattoos as he envisioned when he dreamed of tattooing in Japan. Hardy was the first westerner to be invited into the secretive world of Japanese tattooing, a once-in-a-lifetime learning experience that he couldn’t afford to squander.
Watching traditional hand tattooing in person was the culmination of nearly a decade of fascination with Chinese and Japanese folk art. A scholar as much as an artist, Hardy got his start drawing tattoos on his friends when he was 12, creating flash sheets out of the tattoos he saw on sailors, but that was only the beginning of a lifelong fascination that he could never abandon, even after fine arts and printmaking training at the San Francisco Art Institute. He watched in awe as his host, Kazuo Oguri, performed hand tattoo sessions, tebori, with bamboo needles and small, quick movements of the wrist, delicate angling of the curved needles to push ink into the opened skin. Clients removed their clothing to reveal bodysuits and intricate displays of the imagery and symbols that Hardy had obsessed over since he was a boy, sent trinkets by the father who spent most of Hardy’s childhood at sea in the Pacific. Appointments were made by referral only, and instead of storefronts, tattoo artists operated out of private studios. It’d been nearly 30 years since World War II ended but the United States was constantly in conflict with someone somewhere, and the efficient, military-centric assembly line tattoo style had stuck around in American shore towns. The Japanese tattooers who welcomed him operated differently than those in American shops, where the majority still worked in assembly-line fashion for soldiers and sailors: Come in, point at something on the wall, go to the first guy for your outline, second guy for your shading, third guy for your color, then get the fuck out. It had been Ed Hardy’s dream to tattoo in Japan, and while it was mostly living up to expectations, he couldn’t help but feel just a little disappointed.
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