On the Fine Art of Tattoo Collecting (2024)

Back in 1983, Jo Haemer made herself a promise: each year, she would buy a piece of art. She had an appreciation for such things, as a jeweler, the daughter of a Sorbonne-trained artist, and as an art school dropout herself. She met tattooer Don Nolan that year, as he was passing through Portland, “slinging ink” out of a friend’s living room. “I inherited my grandmother’s beautiful skin,” says Haemer. “And I thought never in a million years would I ever, ever, ever, never, ever put a tattoo on my skin.”

Haemer, then 31, recognized a sketch Nolan was working on from her art school days. “Chen Rong, 13th century, Nine Dragons scroll,” Nolan told her.

“Oh f*ck,” she recalls thinking. “I’m gonna have to have a piece of this guy’s art. And I’m gonna have to lay some skin out for it.” By the next weekend, a Chen Rong dragon covered her thigh.

Collecting tattoos is similar to collecting, say, paintings. You might assemble the work of a favorite artist, or commit to a particular artistic school, or wander the world gathering genre-defying pieces that tell the story of your travels. But the gallery is the body, a crucial detail that industry players say keeps the medium honest. “The ontological fact of doing a tattoo on somebody is irreducible: it can’t be leveraged in the ways that other things can,” says Dan Gilsdorf, tattooer and proprietor of Atlas Tattoo in North Portland. “The lack of a secondary market is major in the way that tattooing functions in the culture.” There’s truly no motive for collecting them beyond pure enjoyment.

Thus, the world’s most renowned collections are living galleries, and you might glimpse a collection when its owner reaches for an oatmeal container in the cereal aisle. Perhaps the biggest contrast between assortments of tattoos and other art is in their formation. While a fine art buyer might bid on pieces decades after their genesis, or even long after the artist’s death, tattoo collectors appear on artists’ doorsteps with their bodies, ideas, tastes, and rolls of bills. The tattooer ascertains skin tone, scars, birthmarks, blemishes, limbs size and shape, and pain tolerance. It’s a collaboration rooted in practicality: if you want a masterpiece across your ribs, you’ll first have to convince your artist that you can make it through the session. The canvas is alive.

Common advice to collectors is to find an artist who can do no wrong. For Eric Wolf, 60, that was the legendary Portland tattooer Terry Tweed, who first gave Wolf a full sleeve, largely a totem to his Africa safari travels, 25 years ago. “It took almost a year,” says Wolf. “Then I thought, ‘I feel unbalanced.’ So I had Terry do my other arm.” On that limb, he let Tweed run wild with pure Americana. “He did a clipper ship and a big eagle and a pinup girl and roses, and a heart and dagger with my kids’ names.” This mix of artists’ creations alongside collectors’ friends-and-family tattoos is common. Tweed eventually filled out most of Wolf’s right leg with a massive koi fish, blending bold-lined, American Traditional tattoos with Japanese imagery.

As a collection grows, the relationship between the tattoos increasingly matters. “Filler” tattoos—designed to bridge gaps and smooth over awkward blank spots—come into play. As the metaphorical gallery walls fill up, options for new acquisitions are dictated by existing pieces. Wolf expanded beyond Tweed, traveling the country to visit top artists.

As a pastime, this is both expensive and time-consuming. Classic tattoo shops are built around a cash-only, walk-in model, and decorated with ready-to-tattoo “flash” designs developed around traditions of visiting sailors. Walk-in tattoos still happen, but most artists work by appointment and run lengthy waitlists. Reasonably experienced tattooers charge $150–250 per hour, with celebrity tattooers sometimes charging four times that, fueled by a social media fever that has expanded their audiences and compounded the challenge of getting “in the chair.” It helps to become a family friend, as happened for Wolf with Tweed.

Haemer doubled down on her investment in Nolan. Despite her being married to a tattooer, all of the art on her body is by Nolan, who went on to become an internationally revered tattoo artist. By 2000, that Nine Dragons scroll wrapped down and around her calf, back up over her hip, and across most of her back, landing gracefully in a smoky cloud over her shoulder. Collectors often note how a patchwork sleeve or body suit is eventually coaxed into a single piece, like a mural—or an ancient scroll. When people ask how many tattoos Haemer has, she delivers a deadpan, “One.”

The One-Piece Gallery

Jo Haemer, 71, Jeweler and Metalsmith

Artist Don Nolan insisted on the placement of Haemer’s first tattoo, covering a tangle of skin-graft scars on her thigh from a childhood burn accident. “Basically, it changed my entire sense of self-image. It’s like somebody getting a nose job,” she says. The tattoo assuaged insecurities, but Haemer opted to keep her art easily coverable by clothing as her collection grew. “I’m an old hippie, a counterculture, f*ck-the-man kind of person,” she says. “But I’m rather quite civilized. To the average person, I look like a retired kindergarten schoolteacher or librarian—as long as my tattoos are covered.”

Tattooers’ eyes sparkle when they hear Nolan’s name; Haemer was just as smitten. “After my first session, everybody said, ‘Oh, you’re hooked now, you’ll be back.’ And I thought, ‘No way.’ And then he came back a year later, and I couldn’t peel off $100 bills fast enough.” She followed him around the country for the next two decades, completing her “one” tattoo.

Through the rise of tattoo TV shows and social media, Haemer has seen the outsider status tattoos used to carry wane. She waxes nostalgic: “What we felt was a deeply personal sense of otherness has become a part of pop culture.”

Acquaintances often ask her what her tattoo will look like when she’s old. “Like this!” she says. “I am old. This thing is 40 years old, and it’s still lovely.” The secret, she says, is no horizontal lines, and “no geometric sh*t. Because eventually all of this stuff just spreads and softens.”

The Family Album

Chisa Sanders, 52, Owner, A New U Salon

Sanders got her first tattoos casually, as a teenager. It wasn’t until she met Dan Gilsdorf at Atlas Tattoo two decades later that she engaged with the community in a meaningful way. He tattooed a pair of scissors and a comb on her upper back, commemorating her achievement of owning her own salon. “Beauty,” her favorite term of endearment, is spelled out in a lacy script. “Everybody knows, when I see somebody, I say, ‘Good morning, Beautiful. How you doin’, Beautiful?’”

She and her daughter, Chiara, are Atlas regulars. They’ve developed a joint collection, with several matching or complementing tattoos. “I have a moon, and she has the sun,” says Sanders. The women also each have a Chanel logo, because their names both begin with the letter C. “They’re good people at Atlas,” she says, noting that Gilsdorf has historically run any of her daughter’s potentially regrettable tattoo requests by her.

Atlas artist Jerry Ware has done most of her larger work, including the duo of portraits framed by a growing bouquet of bright-red flowers on her thigh. “They knew how to pick up the pigment in the colors in my skin,” she says. “They put an underground color to pull the pigment through, kinda like hair. So they put an undertone of white or yellow before the red.” One portrait is borrowed from tattoo flash, with the features reworked to resemble a Black woman’s. The other is Sanders’s own likeness. “My kids laughed at me,” she says. But the way she sees it, “Well, everybody got everybody else’s face—I can put my own face on!”

The Diversified Portfolio

Eric Wolf, 60, Owner, Wolf and Son Cabinetmakers

The phrase “tattoo collector” is foreign to Wolf. To him, it’s more an ongoing habit of appreciation. “I like good tattoos and tattooing,” he says. “Terry [Tweed] gave me a taste for good tattoos.”

Wolf began collecting relatively late, receiving his first tattoo at age 35. Hiscuration was guided by Tweed’s taste and sensibilities. The artist sent Wolf to notable tattooers around the country, including Freddy Corbin in Oakland, Jack Rudy in Los Angeles, and Mike Perfetto in Brooklyn. Wolf’s collection is diverse, but clearly curated from a specific point of view, and in the American Traditional style. It’s also settled over time. Ink naturally spreads and dissipates through the years. Tattoos can be retouched, though most people opt to let theirs age like a beloved pair of jeans. “I like the fact that they’ve blurred and dulled a bit,” Wolf says.

He also continued frequenting Tweed’s shop. “When he started talking about retiring, I said, ‘Do you have it in you to do my leg?’” He did. The koi fish on Wolf’s right leg is the last tattoo Tweed completed, before his death in 2016.

Despite decades of collecting, Wolf isn’t precious about his art; he sees tattoos’ fleeting nature as integral to the medium. “When I go, it goes,” he says. “All this beautiful work that I paid money for and suffered for and loved and that people have admired—when they close the lid on the box, it’s done, it’s all gone.”