Jack Armstrong Main
Jack Armstrong (born on 6/3/1919 in Seattle in the back of his mother’s tattoo parlor.)he is one of the legends of tattooing. ”I have ink running through my veins.” He passed away on 10/29/07
Beginnings
He was born in Seattle in the back of his mother’s tattoo parlor. ”She birthed me herself,” he said. ”She was tattooing a sailor who was getting his whole body done when right in the middle she said, ‘Well Gus, I’m going to have to take a break.’ She went into the room in the back, birthed me and then got up and finished the tattoo.”
He received his first tattoo when he was 7. He did it himself and ”got a beating I can still feel.” When he was 9, after stealing ink and needles from his mother, he set out on his own, doing tattoos for a nickel. He got a lot of business outside of bars around closing time. At 16, he settled in Portland, Ore., and opened a parlor, Jack’s House of Tattoos.
”In the old days, you could go into a toilet and tattoo,” he said. ”I used to use the same needle on 50 people. You can’t do that anymore.”
These days, Mr. Armstrong lives in Las Vegas, Nev., and does not do much tattooing anymore. But he still loves to get tattoos. Four years ago, two renowned tattoo artists at a convention in Memphis each inked a skull in one of Mr. Armstrong’s ears, just above his hearing aids. ”They did it right on stage,” said Mr. Armstrong, who gets around in a motorized chair, a cane across his lap. ”The whole convention stopped for 30 minutes while Jack Armstrong got skulls in his ears.”
Being a very religious Mormon he has a tattoo on his back of Jesus, two dozen past presidents of the Mormon Church and himself.
Career
Jack’s House of Tattoos
Style
Jack Armstrong in Popular Culture
Scratcher-someone who doesn’t do tattoos professionally, but thinks they do. Example.. if they call their machine a “GUN” they are probably a scratcher…In my profession we say.. “Tis a lesser crime indeed to call my father a thief and my mother a whore than to call the sacred machine of tattooing a GUN” – Jack Armstrong who was billed as the “oldest living tattoo artist in the world” Doing it better and longer.
Business Ventures
Honors
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