Tattooing celebrities also brought you notice, like being on the inside cover of Rolling Stone and even on their Christmas card. What was one of the best things that came of that?

Well, I’ll tell you what wasn’t: Fame and fortune don’t necessarily walk hand in hand. You have to be smart enough to make the fortune from the fame. But I never was a money-grubber. The buck was never first and foremost to me. All my publicity, which was mostly from women I tattooed, started in the late ’60s. 1970 was a bumper year for me, ’71 even more so, and ’72 was my heyday. I don’t even know why you’re talking to me now. I’m a has-been. But I guess that’s better than being a never-was.

Has there ever been a backlash to your popularity?

Not really. There were some people I alienated because of my popularity. Today, I have guys coming up to me and saying, “I want to be as famous as you someday.” And I say, “You ain’t fucking good-looking enough!” [Laughs.] But tattooing has really been kind to me.

What do you think about today’s popularity of tattooing?

It’s too easy. Too accessible. Today, you see supplier catalogs in the tattoo shop waiting room. And the shops have become pussycats and hangouts for yuppies and other degenerates. These silly bastards are getting tattooed on the sides of their necks and getting their hands all marked up. When people start screwing around with their bodies, they keep looking for new avenues and then it gets into one-upmanship. How do you take a day off? These people can’t take a day off unless they go to some blind farm. I’m not ashamed of my tattoos, but they are nobody’s goddamn business.

Tell me about your first tattoo.

When I was growing up during WWII, many servicemen coming back from the war or on leave would have a tattoo dribbled on them, and boy, those were hot stuff to me, something everything teenage boy would admire—travel, adventure, romance. Tattoos to me were like stickers on my luggage. I just had to have one.

When did you get it?

In 1946. I went to San Francisco when I was 14 one day—I lived 120 miles north of San Francisco—but not to get a tattoo, just to see the big city. I passed by a shop and peeked in the door and the guy says to me, “What the hell do you want?” I said, “Umm,” and pointed to a heart with “mother” because I could afford that one. I remember when I stepped over the threshold of that shop I had no idea where it was leading me. It was stepping into a time machine. It consumed my whole life.

What was it that was so attractive to you?

I don’t know. It was an atavistic tug. Atavism is a reversion to primitive nature. I believe in genetic remembrance. How many thousands of generations of cultures have had tattoos as an important part of their culture? Tattooing is the mother art. It’s been around as long as anything else. Neanderthals could have tattooed; there’s evidence of that in cave paintings. But the damn church got involved and destroyed everything they didn’t agree with, so there’s a gap in the record, but it dates back long before written history. Being a tattoo artist is the closest goddamn thing the general public has to a witch doctor they are ever going to get. We all suffer from the lost tribe syndrome.

When did you start tattooing?

Three years later I was tattooing professionally, in 1949. The designs we’d do in those days are what they now call “old school.” At least they spell school correctly. Now there’s “new skool” with a K. I’m coming out with a school, a style of my own called “old stool.” We’ll only use brown outlines.