Sailor Jerry

Tattooing, of course, has a history that predates even the most knowledgeable scholar. The popularity of tattooing in America though can pretty much be traced to Sailor Jerry during as far back as World War I.  

Sailor Jerry is the name given to Norman Collins, old-school tattooing legend who acquired the name ‘Jerry’ after his father noticed his troublemaker son had the same disposition as the family’s mule (yes, mule) named Jerry. It’s a name that stuck through his stint in the Navy, indeed throughout his life.

At 19, Sailor Jerry enlisted in the Great Lakes Naval Academy and then spent the next 10 years traveling the globe on schooner ships. It was this experience and the time spent in the Orient that heavily influenced Jerry’s leading him to assimilate Asian styles and colors into his tattoos. The style he developed subsequently became the trademark for the shop he opened in Honolulu’s China Town.

After his time in the Navy, Sailor Jerry settled in Oahu, a then-remote island in Hawaii. Jerry would spend the next 40-years perfecting his technique. Jerry’s tattoos became highly recognized and talked about and even made their way into the very secretive Japanese tattooing world, known as Horis.

In today’s day and age, tattoo hygiene and sterilization is serious business and an artist that doesn’t follow sterile procedures is known as a scratcher. Jerry worked hard to ensure that his needles and equipment were clean and sterile and that his shop was tidy.

Jerry had three protégés Mike Malone, Ed Hardy, who today is as famous as Jerry, and Zeke Owen. After Jerry’s death in 1973, he left simple instructions with regards to his shop, one of them was to take it over or burn it to the ground. Thankfully Mike Malone took over the shop and kept the name alive.