Ed Hardy

Tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy is considered by many to have been one of the biggest influences in the current tattoo Renaissance and one of the best tattoo artists in the world. Clearly he found his life's calling: he's got pictures of himself drawing elaborate tattoo designs on friends with colored pencils starting at the age of eleven.

He was one of the first to truly apply an art school approach to designing tattoos, and he was the first modern tattoo artist to fuse styles and sensibilities of Western and Japanese tattooing in his work.  Tattoo history says that it was his loaning of a notebook full of traditional Borneon designs to LA tattoo artist Leo Zulueta that has resulted in the modern tribal tattoo design movement. A fine art painter as well as a tattooer, Hardy is now retired in Hawaii and devotes his time to his own art. The last full-scale tattoo he completed before he stopped tattooing professional was a large-scale torso piece on comedienne Margaret Cho.

Known as Ed Hardy in the tattoo world, he used just his middle and last name for his tattoo work. Although retired, his designs are now seen everywhere as he's licensed them for use on merchandise that bears his name. You can find them on shirts, shoes, hats, notebooks, cigarette lighters and much more.

Ed Hardy put out a magazine for a while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, called Tattootime. Although it only ran for a handful of issues, it really made its mark on the tattoo scene. The first issue "New Tribalism" came out and showcased the tribal fusion style that was coming out of Los Angeles at the time. Back then, it was the sort of thing that punk rockers and the SM scene was getting for skin art. Now you can't go anywhere in the tattoo world and not see these designs.

Hardy also published books of his own tattoo flash work. One whole stunning book is nothing but dragon designs, in just about every sort of variation you could imagine. His "2000 Dragons" project was a gigantic paper scroll upon which 2000 Dragons in honor of the year 2000 were created to form one unbroken enormous canvas, and he released a book to document the effort which took several years.