Japanese Tattoos

This photograph is from 1994. This picture was taken during the NTA convention "meet and greet." This meant it was a huge photo op for anyone with a certain amount of convention access. I shot close to 80 pictures in the space of about two hours, running around a giant ballroom full of tattooed people.

This was the first time I got to see or photograph traditional Japanese hand tattooing. I was struck immediately by the subtlety of some of the shading. There is a quality to it that you just don't see in Western tattooing.

The young man wearing the tattoo didn't speak any English, so I wasn't able to talk to him. You could tell by looking at his face as he turned slowly to be photographed by dozens of onlookers that he was very proud of his tattoo, and that he wished he could ask some questions of all of us too.

This is a woman who had her leg tattooed entirely by hand at the 1994 NTA convention, and was kind enough to let me watch, take pictures and chat with me about it. The picture that you see of the tattoo artist working by hand in the introduction to this lens is the Japanese master working on this very tattoo.

She was the partner of an American tattoo artist, and she was getting the kanji for his name on her leg along with a single cherry blossom petal. Conscious of how long it could take to work by hand, she told me she purposely made it be a small design so that the Japanese tattoo master could work entirely by hand and not use a tattoo machine to save time. In a convention setting, outlines are often done by machine just to help get the design done a lot faster, with shading then done using the hand techniques.

I asked her if she felt any difference between the sensation of having a tattoo done by machine versus by hand. She thought for a moment and then said she'd almost say the Japanese hand technique was "cool" whereas the Western machine method felt more "hot." She felt the work she was getting was less painful, but she could also feel the distinct punctures of the needles into her skin, which she said felt sort of weird. If it's very quiet, you can hear the hand tool puncturing the leg, and it makes a strange crunch/popping sound, almost like when you hear a rat or rabbit chewing on something.

The completed design, shown here, took just about an hour to tattoo. Now imagine how many square inches there are in a full Japanese body suit and you start to understand why they can take up to a decade to complete.

Ed Hardy - Japanese Tattoo
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The person shown here is Maron, who I met at Bondage A Go Go in San Francisco in 2005. He was competeing in their tattoo contest one night.

His body suit was done in Japan, by tattoo master Horiyoshi III. Maron lived there for a few years, having work done on a steady basis to get it all completed in such a short time. The outline has machine work, but all the color and shading was done with the traditional hand methods.

He's covered solid from wrists to ankles. The color detail and shading you can see when standing next to him and viewing in person just can't be adequately described. The tones and blending is just amazing. There is cross-hatching and very complex shading, as in very skilled pen illustration, in the black outlines and shading of the tattoo at a level that you just don't see being done by American tattoo artists.

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