Mark Mahoney Main
Mark Mahoney (born in Boston Massachusetts, USA) As soon as I walked into Buddy Mott’s tattoo shop in Rhode Island I knew that was what I needed to do. It was like an epiphany.
Beginnings
At 14 living in Massachusetts where tattooing was illegal, Mark and his friends would go to Buddy Mott’s tattoo shop in Rhode Island. “I could always draw, you know, and I knew I was going to end up doing something with art and shit, but not until I walked in there did I know for sure. It took me a while to get somebody to give me a machine, but the seed was planted right then and there. It never wavered. I never wanted to be a rock star or anything after that. I wanted to be a tattooer.” “One of the older guys from the neighborhood, Mark Herlehy, had joined the Navy. He was a great artist. He’d picked up some equipment and knowledge in his travels. He came back and had me do a back piece on him for my first tattoo. Now he has a tattoo shop in New Hampshire. He’s run it by himself for about 30 years, drawing every tattoo on freehand.”
He officially started in ‘77, tattooing full-time in the motorcycle clubhouses in Boston. Then he went to New York and worked out of a little pad on Elizabeth Street on the Lower East Side. he was hanging around with the CBGB’s set. Then he went to the West Coast in about 1980.
Tattoos and fasion seem to be everywhere right now and Mark does have something to do with that “I can’t remember how Betsey Johnson got connected with me. I like to dress sharp. I must have met some people along the line, shopping for vintage clothes or whatever. But I was contacted by Betsey Johnson back in the ’80s to do some design work for her, and it was probably one of the very first times fashion and tattooing came together. She made three styles and it sold really huge. I got paid nothing. Then she had a retrospective of her work last year, and when that stuff came down the runway people went crazy for it and she ended up redoing it. She called me up and was super-cool and she ended up paying me a little better this time. She probably didn’t even have to do that.” And how is he different “I have a little thing of my own going now with Valhalla clothing. That’s just a response to the brightly colored, garish tattoo T-shirts that we’ve been overexposed to. I just wanted to bring something for people who like black and gray tattoos. It’s a little more understated aesthetic, you know? They got some of the greats of black and gray, like me and Freddy Negrete, to draw some stuff.”
When ask if he liked getting tattooed as much as he liked givening them he answers “I can definitely tell you that I don’t. I have great experiences, and I like getting tattooed to be an event. I probably have less tattoos than a lot of guys who have been doing this as long as I have. A New York photographer friend of mine, Nan Goldin, has some pictures that she’s publishing from a night when we stole a car to go down to Rhode Island to get tattooed. It’s cool to have tattoos with such specific memories. I can dish it out a lot better than I can take it.”
Career
We want to keep it as clean as a dentist’s office, but as fun as a bar room. This is the real world, and it’s a street art form. The more street you take out of it, the more fucked up it is.
Mark Mahoney’s Shamrock Social Club
9026 W Sunset Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90069-1819
Phone: (310) 271-9664
Style
He is know for his black and gray fine shading work “Since I was a kid, when I’d get a box of crayons, the black one would be gone before I’d even touch the colored ones. I wanted to figure that into tattooing.”
Mark Mahoney in Popular Culture
Who was the first famous person ever to sit in your chair? “It was probably Johnny Thunders in New York. I tattooed Sid Vicious a few times before he got sidetracked. When I got out here, I tattooed Johnny Depp on one of his first nights in L.A., but at the time he wasn’t famous. Mickey Rourke was instrumental. He started coming to the old Shamrock on Third Street. He was a fixture there. He brought a lot of people to me. That was really the beginning of the celebrity thing.” Then came “Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie—just about anybody with a tattoo that’s in the public eye, at one point in time I probably tattooed them. Even Notorious B.I.G., Puffy.”
Business Ventures
Design some clothes with Betsey Johnson and is now doing T-shirts.
He has also been work in the movie “I’ve been doing Tony Scott movies for years. Since True Romance, any time he has needed a tattoo design, I’ve been doing it for him. I did Domino and we have just been working on The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 that’s coming out this summer. [He's] such a cool, passionate guy. He’s so into every single aspect of his moviemaking. He can draw and make a little sketch of how he wants a tattoo. He’s, like, the perfect customer. I’ve done it other times and it’s not so easy. Other people don’t have the across-the-board, myopic attention to detail that he has.”
Honors
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