Norman Keith Collins left California at fourteen, rode freight trains across the country, and learned to tattoo in a Chicago back room by paying men with cheap wine to let him practice. He joined the Navy at nineteen, spent his service moving through the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, and ended up in Honolulu running a shop on Hotel Street. When Pearl Harbor was bombed nine miles away, he tried to re-enlist and was turned down for a heart condition. So he stayed, and tattooed a generation of men passing through on their way to war. Collins spent his career in active correspondence with Japanese tattoo masters, absorbing their water shading, their background perspective, their understanding of the body as a single composition, and fusing it with the bold lines of the American sailor tradition. The result was American Traditional style as it still exists today. He invented purple ink. He developed needle formations still in use fifty years after his death. He died on his Harley-Davidson in 1973 and told his wife to burn the shop to the ground if the right people didn't take it over. Then, decades later, his name became a rum brand selling six hundred and sixty thousand cases a year. His widow found out in a restaurant.
More info: tattooarchive.com/history/collins_norman_sailor_jerry.php en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailor_Jerry
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