Tattoo Masters: Don Ed Hardy
World renowned tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy has long been retired, but his influence on the tattoo world remains burning brightly in the Bay Area and beyond.
Hardy ushered in a new era of tattoo art during the boom of the 1970s and 80s that resulted in a seismic cultural shift that meant more widespread acceptance from wider society.
Hardy took the classical American flash tattoo of mentor Norman ‘Sailor Jerry Collins’ and fellow San Francisco legend Lyle Tuttle – then applied his artistic bona fides to create charismatic custom tattoo art fusing the best of east and west.
These days most people read the words Ed Hardy and think of a gaudy fashion brand that peaked around 2010. Those with a love for tattoo history recognize the power and passion for the art form Don Ed Hardy represents.
Read on to learn more about Don Ed Hardy, his life, and commitment tattooing and to art.
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Early Life and Career
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“I was first mesmerized by the world of tattooing at the age of ten and began obsessively drawing tattoo flash then,” Hardy stated on his website.
Don Ed Hardy was pictured in the local newspaper, barely a teen, tattooing neighborhood boys on their arms and chests with black wax markers for his version of a first tattoo. He’d seen sailors and soldiers return to coastal Costa Mesa, California, and was drawn to their collection of skin art souvenirs.
“Each codified form had its own rigidly conventionalized style. Accompanied by often enigmatic phrases, every design was a little drama unto itself. The overall effect was abstracted, menacing, puzzling and hypnotic. I have drawn, tattooed, and studied these raw power units for fifty years.”
Hardy fell in love with tattoos during a time in which the tattoo community was not accepted by wider society. As opposed to many other tattooists in the mid-late 20th century – usually hard-bitten men with a thirst for excitement and a military background – Hardy opted for the tattoo industry instead of art school, university and a life of academia.
Hardy opted out of a full scholarship to Yale after gaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking from the San Francisco Institute. He took up the tattoo design, the tattoo machine and needle, and never looked back.
“I started apprenticing and really learning the tools,” he told the New York Times. “People didn’t really do custom tattoos at the time. It took a while to build up the business, and I loved it. It was a cash business, and you were your own boss.”
In the 1960s, a US city the size of San Francisco or Seattle might have just a single tattoo shop, and Los Angeles suburbs like Santa Monica or Orange County a single tattoo artist. They lacked the facilities, tattoo apprenticeship, look, and personality of parlors like Ed Hardy’s Tattoo City we find in modern tattooing.
“In those days, everything was very secret,” Hardy said in 2009 interview. “Tattooers were classed as the lowest form of humanity, so you kept to yourself.”
Despite Hardy’s knowledge and interest and fine art, the symbolism he found in the tattooed servicemen of his childhood and the blue-collar work ethic were features of the tattoo industry he found irresistible.
“I love the fact that tattooing is a craft,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “that there is a working-class aesthetic to it. I came out of a blue-collar thing, and so did my wife. The craft aspect is what I also liked about etching: There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.”
Ed Hardy’s Tattoo City, Neon Sign Image: Gary Stevens CC BY-2.0
Evolving Traditional American Tattooing
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Hardy built an almost peerless reputation as the USA’s most creative tattoo designer. Hardy’s tattoo imagery mixed Asian, Californian, and American themes throughout his tattoo art, and developed a range of unique types of flash. Hardy told the New York Times: “I just wanted to develop it as a challenging medium. It was just stupid that everything had to have black outlines.”
Whereas most active tattooing designs in that era were picked off a wall before being inked into skin, Don Ed Hardy tattoos were a more collaborative effort with customers and a more alternative art endeavor. “My intention was to turn it into a bespoke thing where people could come in with their ideas,” he said in 2019, ahead of an exhibition of his fine art curated by the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
Hardy often tried to play down his influence on the development of tattooing as an art form. “Sailor Jerry was the first one that broke through with color, to research pigments,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006.
“Tattooing is not just aesthetics, it’s also about what can be used safely in the skin. Sailor Jerry did all the research. Then myself, and a couple of other people expanded on it. I thought, ‘Why can’t tattoos be polychromatic, like a painting or anything else?’ I thought it was a medium that was ready for expansion.”
Pinned Design, Tattoo City SF, 2010 Image: Gary Stevens CC BY 2.0
Applying Japanese Tattoo Aesthetics
“For many years my tattoo style was also based on intense study of Asian art traditions, particularly Japan’s ukiyoe culture of the 18th and 19th centuries.” Hardy wrote in his artistic statement about Japanese tattooing.
In a short piece he wrote for Bloomberg News, Hardy said, “A friend showed me a book of Japanese tattoos, and I started to realize this could really be developed into a powerful artistic medium.”
“It was mind blowing,” Hardy told the SF Chronicle. “It was so much more advanced than Western tattoos. These tattoos were fitted to the whole body, epic things with mythological subjects. I thought, ‘If tattoos can look like this, it would be a challenging medium to work in.’
When NBC did a piece on an exhibition of his contemporary art – titled East meets West – in the late 2000s, the news service wrote of the Eastern influence in Hardy’s tattoo art but also in that of his painting and prints as well. “While tattoo artists like Horiyoshi II, Horiyoshi III and Sailor Jerry Collins were influential on Hardy’s tattoo style, so, too, was his training in East Asian art… It’s also apparent in his printmaking.”
“Hardy developed an absolutely unique graphic style that throughout its evolution continually pays homage to both the profound gravitas of body art’s atavistic significance and the edgy, secular tastes of modern urban tribalism,” Artweek said of the unique fusion between cultures Hardy could create with either tattoo machine and ,needle or paintbrush.
Hardy’s status in the Bay area – both as an artist and cultural icon – was such that in 1999, then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown nominated Hardy to serve on the city’s Cultural Arts Commission an almost unheard of feat for a tattooist to achieve.
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Ed Hardy: The Brand
In his Bloomberg piece Hardy wrote, “It all started to go mainstream in the 1980s. People learned of me through word of mouth and would fiy in from all over the globe to get tattoos at my shop. It was crazy.”
This scenario led to Hardy’s greatest commercial success, but one which came at a price to his time in the tattoo parlor and lifetime of achievement as renowned tattoo artist.
In 2004 as Hardy approached retirement, French marketer and tastemaker Christian Audigier, fresh of success with the Von Dutch brand, came calling about doing business in high end casual fashion.
“This guy is at ground zero of everything that is wrong with contemporary civilization,” Hardy said in 2007 to UK newspaper the Guardian. “However, if he wants to make a lot of money with my art and it’s not going to be overtly negative, then what the hell.”
Audigier created the Ed Hardy brand and used a small range of his tattoo design, Hardy took a cut as licensing fee, and one of the most polarizing fashion brands of the 21st century was born
At its height, Ed Hardy was moving over $700 USD million in merchandise – including items like colored pencils, perfume, and maybelline eyeliner – and was being worn by everyone from Madonna to Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Ashton Kutcher. Tattoo art had gone crazy, to the tune of ridiculously priced trucker’s caps, $500 bedazzled tee shirts, and custom-made converse sneakers with tigers and diamantes.
It wasn’t a bed of rose tattoos and endless cash though. At one point in 2006 Hardy had to file lawsuit against Audigier claiming a failure to pay royalties – they settled for an undisclosed sum.
Half of the Ed Hardy brand sold to merchandiser Iconix in 2009 before they eventually assumed 85% control.
Hardy and Audigier were never close at any stage, however the tattooist only had good things to say about the flamboyant Frenchman after his death from cancer in 2015.
“We are saddened to hear of the untimely death of Christian Audigier,” he said. “It is a sad end to a brilliant marketer; his incredible energy and vision brought my artwork to global attention.”
While it still turns over at a steady rate – particularly in the Asian market – the Ed Hardy brand has been met with almost unprecedented amounts of ridicule for its garish use of Hardy’s images, and in relation to the type’ of people who bought the brand’s designs (check out Urban Dictionary if you don’t believe me).
Retirement and Return to Fine Arts
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Late in the 2000’s, with the clothing line booming and his son Douglas Hardy returning from Minnesota to tattoo at the Tattoo City tattoo parlor, Hardy retired from tattoo to again focus on art, much of which has been exhibited in fine arts museums.
“My paintings, drawings and prints are partially inspired by primary images from traditional American tattooing of the first half of the twentieth century,” Hardy says in his artist statement.
Noted critic of Japanese fine art and longtime friend of Hardy, Sherry Fowler, said in interview ahead of the de Young exhibition that despite fame as a tattoo artist and brand name, Hardy simply loved art. “He is so passionate,” Fowler said.
“He’s the kind of person who will get up in the morning and say, ‘I’ve been thinking about art all night; I couldn’t sleep.’
“When you’re around him, you feel like you just want to make the most of every moment. You want to see everything. You want to do everything and experience as much art as you possibly can. He’s that kind of magnetic personality.”
Hardy’s artistic statement provides fascinating insight into his love of contemporary art now he’s retired from business – Hardy says: “When I began getting back to painting and drawing for myself in 1987, the old designs of my American heritage instantly resurfaced. This was coupled with a closer scrutiny of my favorite Western artists and traditions, both historic and contemporary. Many of these tended to be eccentric and hermetic.”
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Don Ed Hardy: Still Going, Still Creating
From all accounts, Don Ed Hardy remains sprightly at 75 and still enjoys creating cool alternative art. He’ll stop in occasionally to the Tattoo shop for some pointers to artists and their clients. Having given 40 years to tattooing, Hardy seems happy to be working with paint, brush, and print rather than ink, machine, and needle.
He remains active in the always vibrant Californian art community and nonprofit spaces, and has no plans to slow down.
“I am interested in the kind of weird beauty that is simultaneously dumb, funny, frightening and seductive,” he wrote on his website.
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Don Ed Hardy FAQs
Does Ed Hardy Still Tattoo?
No. After the success of Christian Audigier’s Ed Hardy line, the tattooer put down his machine and retired in the late aughts.
According to Ed Hardy’s Tattoo City official website:
“Ed Hardy is no longer tattooing. He has retired from tattooing to focus on more personal art and spending time with friends and family.”
Hardy uses his free time to create. Hardy’s work in fine art can be found here
Click on the links below for the rest of our Tattoo Masters collection: