The following is a brief excerpt from Tattoo History: A Source Book, by Stephen G. Gilbert now available in print.

Tattoo History Source Book: Yesterday and Today - By Don Ed Hardy - transcribed and edited by Steve Gilbert .

I think the real breakthrough in the late sixties and early seventies began with Sailor Jerry. He was the Cezanne of modern tattooing. He was greatly influenced by Japanese and Asian art, and he was actually more partial to Chinese culture than Japanese. He tried to integrate that real exotic stuff with contemporary western styles and with a greater range of pigment, and in this way he expanded the repertoire of images he used for tattoo designs.

That's what got me started. I got into tattooing because Phil Sparrow showed me a book of photographs of Japanese tattooing. So I think that the Japanese example was really responsible for what Arnold Rubin used to call "the tattoo renaissance," when Cliff Raven and Don Nolan and Mike Malone and I got into it. After I got the introduction to Kazuo Oguri through Sailor Jerry and went to Japan in l973 with the fantasy that I would stay over there for several years and develop my tattooing and fit right into the culture.

But I found out that my fantasy and reality were quite different. After less than six months I came back to the states and soon after that I opened Realistic Studio in San Francisco. As far as I know it was the first studio in which a tattoo artist worked by appointment only and with the mandate that all work would be one-of-a-kind original designs developed in collaboration with the client instead of offering a set image bank into which the customer had to fit his or her psyche. And immediately I began getting a lot of other tattoo artists as clients because the tattoo community was still quite small then and the grapevine was pretty rapid and a lot of people had heard that I was in Japan and they were curious to see what I had gleaned from over there.

I already had a reputation before I left for doing big Japanese style work because I had been doing some of that in the San Diego shop in the late sixties and early seventies. So I started getting all these tattoo artists in and tattooing them and they would see the environment I was working in, which was a funky little office in the back of an office building. It was the complete opposite of the conventional high profile shop covered with neon signs in the middle of the honky-tonk district. It was attracting people through word of mouth who wanted to be there and who were curious about it and had some previous knowledge of and interest in tattooing.