Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosJeff Johnson, 39, has written a memoir about his experiences as a tattoo artist at Portland’s oldest parlor, Sea Tramp Tattoo Co.
Submitted photo
Portland ink
Tattoo artist collects 18 years of off-kilter stories in new memoir
By David Jasper / The Bulletin
Published: July 25. 2009 4:00AM PSTThe clientele has changed markedly during the 18 years Jeff Johnson has been a tattoo artist.
“When I first started tattooing, it was mostly kind of Burning Man-type people,” says the Portland-based artist, referring to an annual Nevada desert festival where anything goes.
“Rocker dudes, crazy bikers, this kind of thing,” he continues. “And now you can take pretty much any social demographic. It’s college students. It’s dentists. It’s accountants. It’s pretty much everybody at this point.”
Don’t, however, mistake mainstream for mundane. The 39-year-old has gathered stories galore from nearly two decades of decorating the colorful human parade that marches through the doors of Sea Tramp Tattoo Co. It’s Portland’s oldest tattoo shop, according to the book, and Johnson is the co-owner.
Johnson spills the beans about the tattoo world in the new memoir “Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories and My Life in Ink,” his debut book published earlier this month by Spiegel & Grau, part of the Random House Publishing Group. You can hear him read from it Monday at Bend Public Library (see “If you go”), where copies of the book will also be for sale.
The book is “a hybrid concept, an industry exposé-slash-memoir,” he said by phone Wednesday, having just stepped off a plane from Los Angeles after reading in Hollywood on Tuesday. “There’s a lot of stuff about … how shops are changing, the things that I’ve witnessed.”
“Things,” that is, such as the woman with a radically curved spine who had a third, functional kidney and an obese woman who wanted him to tattoo her stomach with a portrait of herself as a young girl. “She insisted that there be no mouth in the portrait,” he writes.
Johnson was interested in art from a young age in his hometown of Houston. He was the art club president at his school in seventh and eighth grade and also tried his hand at drawing comic books.
He moved to Portland about 22 years ago. “I was only supposed to fill in at the tattoo shop for two weeks. I’d been training to tattoo — really, really small things, like names, roses. But I didn’t really think I’d be into it for the long haul.”
After those two weeks, “I realized that this is pretty much what I want to do.”
Legendary tattoo artist Bert Grimm opened Sea Tramp about 26 years ago, after which Don Deaton bought it. Deaton then brought Johnson aboard as partner.
“(Deaton) is in his 70s now, and he kind of wants to retire, and he kind of doesn’t,” Johnson explains. “But he really doesn’t want to run the shop. We make a good team, because I’m a morning person and he’s a night owl, and the shop opens at 10 in the morning and closes at 2 a.m.”
During which hours they see all manner of people.
All sorts of characters
He gives a taste of what you’ll find in the book. “There are people who I’ve tattooed that promptly went out and just murdered a bunch of people. There are people that I’ve tattooed that I was certain were serial killers, and there are things that I’ve seen growing off of people that I wish I’d never seen … ‘What is that?’”
He once had a customer who hid a machete inside a baguette.
“This is one of those situations where you start tattooing someone, and then you realize halfway through the tattoo that the person is totally, utterly insane. But, you know, a lot of crazy people are really good at mimicking sane people, and you don’t really notice until after you’ve been around them a little while.”
It may take 30, 45 minutes, he says but eventually, a red flag will pop up, “and you realize, ‘Oh my God, this guy thinks all these characters from horror movies are actually real.’ And he’s armed with a machete, but the police have hassled him in the past, so he’s disguised it inside of a baguette.”
“He was kind of an insightful crazy person, I guess,” continues Johnson. “The poor guy got stabbed to death in the parking lot of a bar called Tiny Bubbles. That made me really sad, because he really was a sweet kid.”
The inspiration to write a book based on his profession came during a Christmas party he attends annually in Portland.
“Usually at that party, there are a few other writers, painters, sculptors, poets. But every year, everybody wants to hear stories about the tattoo shop,” he says. “After people had read ‘Kitchen Confidential,’” a memoir by celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, “they said, ‘You should write the tattoo version of that.’ So I started dabbling with the idea, and it just came together pretty easily.”
Johnson is no ink-stained dabbler in writing. He started writing science-fiction stories about 10 years ago and began getting them published several years later.
The next issue of Weird Tales magazine will include his short story “The Garbacologist,” “about a guy that’s like an antiquities dealer,” Johnson explains. The main character is the guy to call if you’re having an estate sale or cleaning out an apartment.
“You would call a garbacologist to come and look through what you have laying around and see if any of it’s of any value. It’s a modern urban fantasy thing: He starts to see people’s lost dreams in their trash.”
Writing short stories began as a hobby, but along the way Johnson learned how to craft scenes and write dialogue.
Humming with electricity, honesty
When he was ready to move on to a larger project of memoir writing, his apprentice time paid off: The first thing you notice when you crack open “Tattoo Machine” is that the guy writes prose that hums with all the electricity of, well, a tattoo machine.
Next you’re struck by his honesty. Johnson comes clean about his own inability to take a tattoo like a man, for example. He expects to get some grief from his peers for his brand of honesty.
“Tattoo artists generally are a very iconoclastic group, but (so far) people are really genuinely enthusiastic,” he says. The book hasn’t been out long, but to date, he’s received just one slightly negative e-mail from a woman he describes as the doyenne of Portland tattoo artists, “but I expected this sort of thing to happen.”
His humble assessment of his own artistic skills also lends authenticity to his narrative voice. In the introduction, he writes, “I hail squarely from the center ranks, far from the rarefied air of greatness and equally distant from the hobbling stragglers getting picked off at the back of the herd. The vantage point is good here.”
Johnson describes the artist-client relationship as akin to that of a doctor-patient.
“People’s filters are down,” he says. “They have to trust you to be their artist who’s going to do something permanent on them. And that trust, a lot of time, will drift into them telling you really unusual stories about their childhood, all kinds of different things.
“People are fascinating. It’s one of the reasons that I love this job.”
David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or at djasper@bendbulletin.com.
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