Encylopedia of Body Adornment.pdf - Print My Tattoo

288 TUTTLE, LYLE
tattooist, who tattoos Borneo- or Kwakiutl-inspired designs on his friends for no
cost. This is one reason why punk tattoos are so heavily weighted toward tribalism.
While tribal tattoos were once the ultimate elite, non-Western tattoo, they have
become for many who know how to read such tattoos, simply a relic of an earlier
era, specifically, the 1980s. This is illustrative of how quickly tattoo trends become
popular and then burn out.
Non-Western designs, technology, and styles have firmly uprooted traditional
tattoo designs for most middle-class North Americans. There certainly are aesthetic
reasons for this, in that many of these designs simply make good tattoos, but there
are political reasons as well, which involve repudiating a working-class, whitebread
past.
The irony here is that neither tribal tattoos, nor the Chicano tattoos that have
recently become popular among whites, originated in the middle class—tribal tattoos
were first worn by punks and kinky gays. Yet they have become popularized
through middle-class wear, and the tribal tattoo, at least for a while, stood alongside
the Japanese tattoo as the ultimate middle-class tattoo.
In addition to borrowing tattoo designs from other cultures, there are now a
number of different tattoos that were created to look like non-Western, tribal tattooing.
Tattooist Mike Malone designed a tattoo style in the 1970s called the “Hawaiian
Band” which is a tribal-looking design made to wrap around an arm. While
Malone’s tattoo was not a traditional design, it looked enough like one that many
people assumed it was. This is similar to the “Peace Corps tattoos” which developed
in Samoa as souvenir tattoos for white Peace Corps volunteers but which
later became popular with Samoans as well.
At the same time that middle-class North Americans are wearing tribal tattoos,
the indigenous people of Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand are experiencing
their own tattoo revival. Sometimes the tattoos that they wear are in the tradition
of their culture, and sometimes they are Western images. Quite often, they are
tattooed with tribal tattoos as they have been recreated in the United States by
Western tattooists.
See also: Borneo; Hardy, Don Ed; Moko; Punk; Samoa; TattooTime; Zulueta, Leo
Further Reading: Wojcik, Daniel. Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 1995.
TUTTLE, LYLE
San Francisco tattooist Lyle Tuttle was one of the most influential tattooists of the
1970s. The Vietnam War and the peace movement that it spawned, the civil rights
movement, black power, Stonewall, and the new women’s liberation movement
all shook the foundations of middle-class stability, and all contributed as well to
the changing face of tattooing in the United States. Tuttle, thanks to his vibrant
personality, his quickness with language, his shop in San Francisco, and his status
as a celebrity tattooist who tattooed Janis Joplin and a number of other rock stars
and celebrities, gave tattooing in the 1970s a very public face. Tuttle was also a
great spokesperson for the newly reviving art of tattooing because many tattooists