“If I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it,” blurts a woman breathlessly. She grabs one of the image-filled binders from the counter and flips to a page of Sanskrit lettering. “B, C, P,” she says, jabbing an index finger at each character. “That’s it. That’s what I want.”
Her artist, known simply as “T” and clad in designer glasses and tattoo-covered skin, peers over the counter at her. “Are you okay? It looks like you’ve had a couple of cocktails.”
She waves him off with a flip of the wrist and puts her preppy designer purse down so she can sign the consent form.
She turns to her friend. “I might as well do this, right?”
Her cashmere-wearing companion shrugs her shoulders, feigning disinterest. “It’s your skin, your tattoo.”
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It’s a Friday night on South Street and among the bars, restaurants and clothing stores is an anomaly of a block: the tattoo corridor. Packed with six parlors and a handful of piercing and record shops, it spans the length of 4th Street between South and Bainbridge streets. While the tipsy tattoo is a common sight, alcohol is far from the only thing that motivates people to get inked.
“Without a doubt you’re going to see more impulse buys on a Friday or Saturday night, say in comparison to a Tuesday afternoon,” says Matt McGarvey, the self-described “janitor” who acts more like conductor and ringleader of one of South Street’s Philadelphia Eddie’s parlors.
But with tattoos becoming increasingly mainstream, it’s not just sailors and convicts looking to treat their bodies as a canvas. Across the street from Philadelphia Eddie’s, at No Ka Oi Tiki Tattoo, tattoo artist Cindy Solano, a petite Indian woman with a generous share of piercings and ink, explains that businessmen, lawyers and teachers routinely saunter in.
Last week, for example, a 63-year-old-woman came in to get a tattoo on her birthday. It was her first and, from the sound of it, not her last.
Even scanning Penn’s campus, it’s not uncommon to see a tattoo peeking out from under a hem or sleeve. College junior Donielle Johnson is one of many tattooed students that you might not peg at first glance.
Each of her three tattoos — an umbrella, a hummingbird and a pax cultura symbol — captures who she was at a given point in her life, whether artistically or culturally, she explains. “I was really big into the music scene when I was younger,” she says, attributing her interest in getting inked to early exposure to an edgier culture and to an ex-boyfriend with a penchant for tattoos.
Although Johnson got all three of her tattoos in her home state of Virginia, she admits that South Street is the first place that typically comes to Penn students’ minds when they decide to take the plunge. “Everyone looking for a tattoo parlor in Philadelphia just heads to South Street,” she laughs. “You always know you can get something done there.”
But while the section between South and Bainbridge makes for optimal parlor hopping, it hasn’t always been that way.
According to legend, Eddie Funk, better known as “Crazy Philadelphia Eddie,” was part of the original tattoo dynasty practicing out of New York City’s Bowery neighborhood — the birthplace of modern tattoos — in the 1950s. But in 1961 the city’s ban on tattoo parlors, prompted by a nasty spread of needle-related Hepatitis cases, forced artists to either move underground or move west. Thus the Philadelphia tattoo scene was born.
With the expertise he had developed in New York, Eddie established himself as tattoo baron of Philadelphia out of his Chinatown parlor. Three decades later, his son set up a competing shop — with the same name as his father’s — next door, which led to a massive falling-out between the two. When Eddie Jr. moved to his current 4th Street location, Eddie Sr. followed suit, if only to rile his now-estranged son.
“Eddie and his son just kept opening up shops next to one another, constantly butting heads,” explains McGarvey. The black widow spider tattoo creeping out from under his buzzed hair wrinkles as he gestures, pounding his two fists against one another. “They were always in competition.”
But the original Philadelphia Eddie is the godfather of Philadelphia tattoo artistry. After retiring five years ago, he left his four parlors not to his son, but to the top artists in each shop.
“He took care of his guys,” says Don “MF” Juan, a Philadelphia Eddie’s artist known about the city for his intricate Japanese-style designs. “Out of respect to the legend, we still keep his name. He really is world famous.”
The rivalry continues today, with the son’s Philadelphia Eddie’s parlor down the street from one of his father’s old shops, which is differentiated only by a 621 prefix representing its address.
Eddie Sr.’s generosity — and his apprentices’ respect for him — helped create the Philadelphia Eddie’s superblock, as other competitors looked to get in on the success.
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But Troy Timple, current owner of 621 Philadelphia Eddie’s, is making sure that he, not Eddie Jr., is the proper heir to the Philadelphia tattoo throne.
In addition to manning the shop, Timple owns a clothing design company called Tattooed Kingpin. For the needle- and commitment-phobic alike — as well as for those who just cannot get enough of the inked look — he incorporates his tattoo artwork into the designs of clothing and accessories.
Thanks to his own reputation among the city’s tattooists, Timple took the helm of the Philadelphia Tattoo Arts Convention after Philadelphia Eddie retired in 2004. This year’s tenth-anniversary convention, held late last month, proved that tattooing is neither obscure nor taboo in Philadelphia. Over 175 exhibitors and 8,000 attendees flocked to the Downtown Sheraton for the event.
Around the wall-to-wall booths wandered an eclectic crowd, ranging from fully-inked tattoo addicts to couples with ergonomic baby strollers
Despite the handful of non-tattooed guests, the majority proudly showed off past work, opting to forgo shirts, wear bikini tops or cut panels in the backs of their jeans. Several of the more adventurous donned S&M-like get-ups of leather, metal and chains.
With the hundreds of purring tattoo machines — known as “guns” — working at once, the venue sounded more like a bee farm than a downtown hotel. Each parlor took up its five-foot-by-five-foot space in its own way. Though the more modern ones hooked up flat screens projecting previous projects, the rest laid out their tattoo design samples in large binders and print-outs for the slow-moving crowd to skim.
Some of those in attendance came to get new tattoos or touch-ups from their favorite out-of-town artists, while others came solely to win one of several categories in the “best tat” contest.
Philadelphia Eddie and, now, Timple have created a world where the inked feel both comfortable and proud to show off their body art.
No Ka Oi Tiki Tattoo at first glance seems more like a tropical day spa than your typical hole-in-the-wall parlor. The mostly female staff buzzes about amid fake bamboo and palm trees. “It’s like we’re running an art gallery and not just a bunch of a tattoo addicts,” explains Solano. “We’re not in here selling bongs and leather jackets.”
A college-aged girl — along with a posse of nine friends — comes in grasping an image of a hummingbird. She explains that she wants it on her back, gesturing the approximate size.
One of the tattoo artists tells her, “You know, it’s going to look real cartoonish unless we do it really big.”
“How big and how much?” she asks. After hearing the answer (the size of a large deli bagel) and price ($200), her jaw drops and she slinks away — off to the next parlor and the next estimate. These traveling packs of first-timers are a common sight, as entire support groups come to cheer on a brave individual or two.
Solano explains the added struggles that come with the newly mainstream nature of tattoo artistry. “We have to fight hard to educate people. The differences in quality between a $30 and $200 piece are enormous.”
The growing acceptability of tattoos stems partly from the public’s exposure to celebrity tattoo aficionados like Angelina Jolie, David Beckham and reality show LA Ink artist Kat von D. But their burgeoning popularity also means an increase in the number of people jumping into the industry impulsively.
The number of do-it-yourself artists is on the rise, a fact that Solano finds frightening, even though she herself got her hand in the business that way.
“People don’t just look at E.R. and think, ‘Cool, I’m going to pick up a scalpel and do home surgery,’” she says. “But some people see Kat Von D doing her thing and try to tattoo on their own.”
While Solano gave her first tattoo at the age of 13 — after her best friend got a poorly done wrist tattoo and convinced Solano to touch it up — she insists that she “really does not condone that sort of reckless behavior.”
These days, she’s wary of ethically questionable tattoo practices, such as “parlor parties” — where large groups get inked for typically cheap prices — or doing a tattoo that she knows will not look good several years down the road.
“I enjoy the job when it’s a process. I like to sit down with a client, discuss options and work with them,” she says. “Especially if the tattoo is done over several sittings, you’ll develop a relationship. You want that good experience and chemistry.”
College senior Karolina Pater was one of those clients. After having worked the desk at a tattoo parlor in her hometown during high school, she decided to wait several years — “until I was 21 and not as impulsive,” she smiles — before making the permanent decision.
Pater explains that she worked with the artists at No Ka Oi Tiki Tattoo on her self-designed “Let It Be” tattoo across the bottom of her wrist. “I got it for so many reasons,” she says, listing her love of music and the Beatles, as well as the song’s connection to a family member.
She says the ink has sparked conversations she would otherwise never have had, from friends asking about its meaning to strangers expressing their surprise at meeting a “little white girl from an Ivy school” with a tattoo. Even a Buddhist monk once approached Pater outside Fresh Grocer, interested in the tattoo’s origin.
When asked if she might rue her tattoo several years down the road, Pater shrugs. “If anything, it will remind me of being 21 and being carefree and living life.”
If the over 36 tattoo shops and 200 tattooists in Philadelphia have one thing in common, it’s their knowledge that inkers are viewed as derelicts by some and as artists by others.
And although a number of the artists in No Ka Oi Tiki Tattoo have actually attended art school as part of their training or taken up oil painting in their free time, they still face some of the stigma attached to the tattoo industry.
However, more and more individuals are starting to view tattoos as a legitimate form of expression, allowing ink to evolve into a status symbol. Tattoos are becoming so common that even Ozzy Osborne once warned his daughter Kelly, “If you want to be different, don’t get a tattoo.”
The 4th Street superblock and the highly popular Philadelphia Tattoo Arts Convention only serve as testaments to the fact that tattoos are here to stay. The success of each artist and parlor, even in the face of strong competition, highlights the city’s rich tattoo culture and history.
“Philadelphia Eddie was known more for being a bad ass than being a good artist,” says Don Juan. But while the close-knit staff at 621 Philadelphia Eddie’s agrees that it’s not always about being a top-notch artist when it comes to paying the bills, Timple himself proves otherwise.
After spending three hours perfecting a bicep-covering Madonna and Child image for a glassy-eyed twenty-something, he pulls out a large sheet of drawing paper, tucks himself away in the corner and continues to sketch.
