The Story Of Ed Hardy, And How I Got My Ed Hardy Tattoo

Ed Hardy wanted to know if I had any tattoos. "My dad took me to get one when I was 15," I told him, "I got a yellow rose on my ankle, a very 15-year-old girl tattoo to get." Ed Hardy said his first tattoo was also a rose. He buried his under black clouds—a decision that later in life, he tells me, he would come to regret.

Back in May I found myself at Kings Avenue on the Bowery getting a tattoo designed by Hardy. He was to the right of me, and his son Doug to my left, delivering the ink to my arm. Ed was emotional; I saw tears well up in his eyes as he watched his son recreate one of his first ever designs on my wrist, a sailboat he sketched when he was just 10 years old.

A week earlier I had received an email from Hardy's publicist announcing he would be in New York soon for an exhibit for one of Hardy Marks' latest titles—in a series of emails she futilely tried to persuade me into believeing this was significant, but to me Ed Hardy was mostly known as the guy behind those lame T-shirts you see on Jersey Shore types. Eventually, and somewhat facetiously, I replied: "Can I interview Ed, while he gives me a tattoo?" I awaited the inevitable "No," but instead, I got an enthusiastic "yes." I had told myself, stigma be damned, if things went this way, I would do it. There was one caveat to her "yes," however; Ed doesn't actually tattoo anymore, so it would be coming from his son, as I interviewed Ed. And there we were.

Donald Edward Talbott Hardy began his career in tattooing at a young age. "I got interested in tattoos when I was ten years old," he told me, "I started drawing on neighborhood kids. I was doing colored pencil tattoos on kids, using Maybelline eyeliner, I did that for about three years, and drew all this flash." (Flash sheets are what you see on the wall when you enter a tattoo shop.) His grandmother kept a lot of these sheets, and old photographs, so this early era of his tattoo work is pretty well documented.

"This is the first time one of my drawings that I did when I was ten years old is getting put on as a tattoo," he told me, "I'm honored that you picked this." He told his son he was doing a good job, then he explained the design's origins, or at least what motivated him to include it on his flash at that age—"I grew up in the Newport Beach area, it's a famous harbor, sailing town, all the movie stars had boats there... my parents weren't in that economic strata, but I was around all these boats." A sailboat is also, of course, a traditional Americana design in the tattoo world, exactly the kind of design that Hardy would later veer away from as he became interested in Japanese style.

Hardy explained to me how he made tattooing a career, and an art form beyond the classic designs that were basically the only ones available in the U.S. at the time.

"Tattoos were the province of people living outside the constraints of mainstream society—sailors, hobos, and circus freaks," Sailor Jerry Collins once said. Hardy met Collins long before either became Brands™, around 1969, when Hardy's tattoo career began in earnest. He studied under him for years, and in 1973, when Collins suffered a heart attack and died, he left his shop to Hardy and another tattoo artist, Mike Malone—"if it doesn't end up in their hands," he wrote, "burn everything."

Collins also helped Hardy with his initial work in Japanese style design—according to Hardy's publicist: "Thanks to Collins’ rare connections with a number of Japanese tattooers, Hardy spent five months in Gifu City in 1973, working alongside Kazuo Oguri (Horihide), where he was the first Westerner to tattoo in the clandestine Japanese environment. In the Japanese tradition, the entire body would serve as a canvas for a single, sprawling, narrative design, and took a very different shape from the contained, piecemeal Western style."

Hardy told me this is when a big change came for him—"I'd just been tattooing sailors and stuff, I was trying to upgrade it. I came back from [5 months in] Japan determined to just open a private studio where people could come in and tell me what they want, instead of offering something from the wall." Succeeding at this would become part of what is Hardy's legacy in the world of tattooing—he helped bring the art form into the mainstream, and invited the customer into the design process.

By this time Hardy's name was circulating outside of California, and he told me he had "several clients when I began getting a reputation for doing custom tattoos, which almost no one did in those days, and I had a shop in a sailortown area [in California], and I was drawing clients from really all over the place. Several of these wealthy New Yorkers heard about me through the grapevine... they would come out to get these large, Japanese influenced tattoos, and they started saying to me, 'You gotta come to New York, there are a lot of people there that want your work.'"

Hardy never put down roots in New York, but he did set up shop in Washington Square for a couple of weeks. "I had never been to New York," he told me, "and [these New York guys] actually knew somebody who was going to the Hamptons for the summer, so I worked out of an apartment right near Washington Square Park. But I was only here a couple of weeks. I didn't really tattoo a lot... it was illegal in the city, there were only a few tattooers."

Yes, tattooing was illegal in New York City... for decades. In 1961, following a hepatitis B outbreak, the city declared it “unlawful for any person to tattoo a human being." This remained so until 1997. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Hardy had been doing what he would have never been able to legally do in NYC—he opened Realistic Tattoo Studio, a small, appointment-only shop modeled after the private parlors of Japan, and the first of its kind in the States. Then in 1977 he opened Tattoo City (also in San Francisco), which is on its third incarnation today, and is run by his son Doug.

While Doug was tattooing his dad's sailboat on my wrist, he told me he had "moved back to San Francisco in 2009 to help out my father, because he retired from tattooing." Doug was taught the trade in the early '90s, learning from Ed and Sailor Jerry's friend, Mike Malone in Honolulu, where he spent time apprenticing.

It was made very clear to me while I was at Kings Avenue that this tattoo I was getting was special, traces of tattoo legends swirling around with the ink now permanently in my skin. And to think I had suggested this as a joke. What a jerk. But, you know, those T-shirts.

While he should be known to all as a tattoo legend, those garish T-shirts are what Ed Hardy is best known for. Some people don't even know that Ed Hardy is a real person. He told me that he was taking the subway one day and saw a woman wearing one of the shirts, he told her it was his design, that he was Ed Hardy. He gave her a business card, but she still didn't seem to understand.

How did this brand become bigger than the man himself, whose style innovations singlehandedly and permanently changed the prevailing aesthetic of tattooing? All fingers point to the late Christian Audigier (also known as a designer for the Von Dutch brand).

Today you can find Hardy's tattoo designs on not only t-shirts, but wine bottles, perfume, condoms, lighters, hair styling tools... at one point there were 70 sublicensees of Hardy's name and designs, all because of Audigier, who wasn't the first, but was the most famous licensee of Hardy's work.

Audigier's Hardy shirts attracted celebrities like Madonna and Michael Jackson at first.... but this celebrity association, Hardy once said, may have been the brand's downfall: "Christian worships celebrities so much, he will get next to anyone who is famous for anything." Indeed. By the late aughts the brand took a financial hit around the time the shirts were closely associated with the likes of reality TV star Jon Gosselin, who Audigier was photographed on a yacht with in Cannes. Hardy later spoke out, saying: "That Jon Gosselin thing was the nail in the coffin. That’s what tanked it. Macy's used to have a huge window display with Ed Hardy, and it filtered down and that’s why Macy’s dropped the brand."

Simon Doonan, who once touted the brand, by this point was saying it "represent[ed] bad taste." And this seems to still be the consensus. In the end, Hardy said, "morons dehumanized it."

In the bio I was sent, the brand is only mentioned once: "In 2005, approaching the fifth decade of his career, Hardy licensed over a thousand of his designs to Los Angeles-based fashion designer Christian Audigier, who applied the images to lifestyle items, making Hardy a household name."

So I asked Hardy about his own thoughts on the brand—following some off-the-record comments he shared with me in person, he told me this over email: "The amazing success of the Ed Hardy brand took me completely by surprise. Most of the images the licensee used came from flash I'd painted in the late '60s-early '70s—I had no idea about the degree of force and attraction these would generate. The whole thing was an unexpected windfall, and most people buying the products did not even know they were tattoo designs to begin with. It's probably the strangest thing that's happened to me in a life filled with amazing twists and turns."

But Hardy hasn't always been as polite when speaking about Audigier, he described in his 2013 book as: “ground zero of everything wrong with contemporary culture." This is Audigier, during the height of the brand's success:

In his book, Hardy also explained where things took a more serious turn, when Audigier manipulated his imagery and underreported sales.

This cost Hardy Life $5 million in legal fees, and the parties eventually reached a settlement. Hardy went on to partner with another company, Iconix Brand Group (which Audigier, through his holding Nervous Tattoo, Inc., sold most of the master license rights to in 2011). Today Hardy only retains a 15% minority stake in the brand bearing his name and reproducing his images.

When Audigier died in July this year, the NY Times referred to Hardy as a "once obscure San Francisco tattoo artist." Alas, Audigier had done what he promised Hardy prior to licensing his designs, to make his name known... Hardy just didn't expect this to be done in a way that, as he himself put it, would make his name "synonymous with douche."

But the real man is still alive and kicking under all that noisy branding, just like Hardy's first tattoo is still buried under his black clouds. And he seems to regret those clouds much more than his involvement with Audigier. "The only thing I regret about my tattoos, all the early ones... I had them covered in black clouds... And now, you know I miss... some of these people were my mentors, I had evidence of their work, and I buried them in these stupid clouds. The rose is under there somewhere."