By Amelia Kelm Osterud
Photography by Jerry Luterman
Walk into any of the 162 licensed tattoo shops in Wisconsin, and you’re greeted by a steady hum. The distinctive crisp buzz is the mark of the machine that was patented 100 years ago by Samuel O’Reilly, modified from a Thomas Edison electric pen. Over the next century, the precision of the tattoo gun allowed tattooists of questionable character to became bona fide artists working in a jazzy genre of American art.
Although tattooing has come a long way since O’Reilly’s 1891 tattoo machine, the road has been bumpy for the tattooists – and the tattooed. Once considered the realm of prisoners and sailors, tattooing was used by classically marginalized people to express rebellion and nonconformity, says University of Wisconsin–Madison anthropology professor Dr. Neil Whitehead.
Along the way, the craft became more socially acceptable, no longer limited to sideshow performers, servicemen and burly bikers. According to Whitehead, “Tattooing is part and parcel of our culture and society. It’s become incredibly mainstream in the last 25 years.”
Due in part to that stereotype – and perhaps the health risks of shared tattoo needles – Milwaukee (following the lead of New York and other cities) banned the practice on July 1, 1967. Only a handful of tattooists were working in Milwaukee then, and two of them, Gib “Tatts” Thomas and Amund Dietzel, were over 65. “All we want to do is stay here and be quiet,” Dietzel told the Milwaukee Journal in 1966, just after the Common Council approved the ban.
According to public opinion at the time, tattooists and their shops were seedy, and even in cities where tattooing was legal, tattooists ran into many roadblocks. When Green Bay tattoo artist Rick Harnowski wanted to open a shop in 1980, he wasn’t warmly obliged. “I went to City Hall to get a license for a tattoo studio, and they practically laughed at me,” he says.
Armed with information on licensing and health regulations in other cities, Harnowski lobbied officials in Green Bay and Brown County before taking his fight to the state level. He eventually helped create statewide public health regulations and licensing procedures and even trained the first group of state tattoo parlor inspectors.
Tattooing finally returned to Milwaukee in 1998, when new state laws regulating tattooing overrode local bans and set the minimum tattoo age at 18. Today, tattoos – and shops – are everywhere. According to a 2008 Harris Poll, 32 percent of Americans ages 25 through 29 have at least one tattoo. Tattoo styles have evolved, with many customers opting for custom designs over stock flash, or pre-drawn designs. Tattooists are now artists, professionals who work their art on another type of canvas.
Meet six Wisconsin artists with different styles and influences, and a shared love of the art.
Rick Harnowski
Skin Illustrations - Tattoos by Rick, Green Bay
When Polish-born artist Rick Harnowski started tattooing in the late 1960s, he mainly worked on bikers on the road between Green Bay and Chicago. Today, his clients include Green Bay Packers, doctors and corporate executives. Harnowski believes the licensing regulations he helped institute opened the doors to many other great artists working in the state.
Harnowski’s shop has flourished in Green Bay for more than 40 years, and today is a family business. “I’m tattooing 24–7 here, practically, eight days a week if I could,” says Harnowski. His son Josh, who studied art at St. Norbert College in De Pere, tattoos full time with his father; his other sons Dan and Ryan also do tattoo work and help manage the shop.
These days, Harnowski sees a lot more interest in custom tattoos, especially those that symbolize family members or meaningful events in a customer’s life. Harnowski is nationally known for his very fine line work. “A good tattoo is going to have longevity and look good for a very long time,” he says.
John Reiter
Solid State Tattoo, Milwaukee
Artist Jon Reiter, who runs Solid State Tattoo in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood, learned to tattoo from a friend in the summer of 1997. He was so taken with the craft that he sold half of the record store he ran at the time with his brother and dedicated himself to tattooing full time.
Because of the Milwaukee ban, Reiter learned the craft outside of a studio. “It is unconventional, and I don’t recommend it,” he says. Eventually, he was hired at Steve’s Tattoo in Madison, where he learned the technical side of tattooing and gained inspiration from artists there.
Reiter opened Solid State Tattoos in 2004. Along with learning the ins and outs of tattooing as a business, he also became interested in tattoo history and eventually published two volumes of These Old Blue Arms: The Life and Work of Amund Dietzel about Milwaukee’s tattoo legend. “Like anything else, if you get wrapped up in something and dedicate your life to it, you want to know everything about it,” says Reiter. “He was a legend in the tattoo world, he was from Milwaukee – which I love – and I wanted to know why he was so prestigious.”
Greg Foster
Custom Tattoo, Milwaukee
Like many other tattoo artists, Greg Foster began his career as an art student, in his case at UW–Milwaukee in the ’90s. Unsure of what he wanted to do with his life, he started tattooing when a few friends became interested in it. Foster began tattooing professionally in 1996 and has been tattooing on Milwaukee’s East Side since 1998. In 2007 he opened Custom Tattoo with his wife, Rebecca Stewart. Of his profession, he says, “If you actually enjoy what you do, you don’t work a day in your life.”
Keenly aware that there are few second chances in his line of work, Foster makes sure he gets it right the first time. Foster’s art training is evident when he talks about the importance of placement and size of a tattoo design: “There’s a lot of flow to the body; you want to make sure the design fits. If you had a really small painting, you wouldn’t want it on this big empty wall.”
Foster enjoys the variety of his customers and likes helping them turn their ideas into great tattoos. “The most interesting tattoos to do are the ones that really mean something,” he says. “It really hits home when they look in the mirror after the tattoo is complete and really like it – that means the most to me. I feel proud to be part of that experience.”
Adam Werther
Adambomb Gallerie, Milwaukee
Adam Werther is another art student come tattoo artist. Werther graduated from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design with a major in sculpture and a minor in drawing. Because he loved to draw, a friend suggested he think about tattooing. Werther apprenticed at Black Dragon Tattoo in Waukesha and immersed himself in the art.
He spends a lot of time drawing and considers tattooing one more avenue of his art. “Everything except the moment is dissolved from your mind, and it’s just you and the art you’re working on,” Werther says. “The work is telling you what needs to be done and is more like a discovery rather than a manipulation of subject matter.”
Werther opened his own shop in Milwaukee more than a decade ago. He says a lot of his customers today want large first tattoos – full sleeves or half sleeves. (A sleeve is a tattoo that covers the entire arm, shoulder to wrist or elbow.) “Everything has been huge lately,” he says. “Flattened, a sleeve is the size of someone’s back.”
One design he’s particularly proud of is a horror sleeve, drawn from old movie posters. The words “Horror Business” wrap around the client’s arm, so you can only see parts of it at one time. “As an artistic whole, it really works,” he says. “Elements that bounce throughout, colors that bounce throughout – they lead your eye around the piece.”
Werther’s tattoo business has really picked up lately, so he gets to be more selective about the tattoos he does and gravitates toward designs that excite him. “It’s too much drawing to do to not be excited about it,” he says, and he wants to make sure to get it right, for both his artistic vision and the expectations of the customer.
Dana Withers
Blue Lotus Tattoo, Madison
Just a year after receiving her first tattoo, Dana Withers moved to the other side of the tattoo gun in July 2008. Originally from a small town in Ohio, Withers studied art at Kent State University and the University of Arizona before becoming a tattoo artist. “You’re in that creative mind-frame all day, which is wonderful, which is what I’ve always wanted,” she says.
Tattooing is still a predominately male profession, but Withers hasn’t encountered problems, even though a few people in the profession can be kind of old-fashioned, she says. “There have been shops that say flat out, we don’t want women in here.” She credits recent television shows like LA Ink, which showcases female artists, with expanding the visibility of women in the profession.
Withers works at Blue Lotus Tattoo’s shop on Odana Road in Madison, and notes the customers there are very different from Blue Lotus’ other location downtown near the university. “Here, the clientele is a little older and we do larger pieces. Downtown we have a lot of students and smaller pieces.” She sees a few trends in tattoo placement, such as the popularity of tattoos on the ribs, wrists and tops of the feet. Many people are inspired by celebrities’ tattoos, and Withers works with clients to personalize these designs. “It’s your tattoo, it’s on your body, it has to have you in it,” she says.
George Wang
Waukesha Tattoo Company, Waukesha
George Wang’s shop is part art gallery, part tattoo parlor. “I think people get confused sometimes,” he says. “People who would never go into a tattoo shop come here and look at art.” This works well for Wang, who has undergraduate and graduate degrees in art. “We believe that tattooing is an art form,” he says. “It’s just a different media.” The gallery exhibits change frequently, and the shop always participates in Waukesha’s Gallery Crawls.
Open since 2010, the shop’s upscale look was inspired by Bill Hanson, who founded Waukesha’s Black Dragon Tattoo in 1990. Hanson, who was Wang’s mentor, passed away in 2008. Waukesha Tattoo aims to break the old stereotype of a tattoo shop as a rough place. “I think this is a very natural progression, and plus, we are more comfortable here, too.”
Wang says his shop rarely does flash design anymore; instead, they draw from references, and people bring in their own designs. He credits the push toward custom work to the proliferation of television shows about tattooing. Personally, he likes portraits. “The nature of doing a portrait is very personal,” he says. “You deal with people who are healing, and to me, that’s always an honor.”
Amelia Klem Osterud is an academic librarian at Carroll University in Waukesha and author of The Tattooed Lady: A History.