RAMAYANA TATTOOS

The Sailor Jerry Pin Up Girl Tattoo Picture is courtesy of Legendary Classic, and It's from his great Sailor Jerry collection on flickr.
Copyright: Legendary Classic
“Sailor Jerry did traditional tattoos with the bold lines, the broken hearts and the pinup girls; those iconic images that you really associate with tattooing. They were dark, but they were more the ironic kind of dark,” notes Erich Weiss, a filmmaker who recently wrapped up “Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry,” a documentary on the artist.. Jerry’s humor was also salty as you might expect; some of his designs feature comic-book type characters saying things they couldn’t say in a comic book—or a teen-rated game. “He was big on slogans, lots of double entendres,” Weiss says.
Other designs have secret meanings that a sailor would recognize. Some, for instance, would wear a pig on one foot and a chicken on the other—that meant that the farm animals would help your safe return to land. Sparrows on the chest would represent the number of nautical miles you’ve travelled. A golden dragon would mean you sailed the Asiatic Sea, and a turtle meant that you’d crossed the equator in a submarine.
It was a natural evolution when the original 50’s rock’n’rollers, the greasers and bikers, adopted tattooing; and this was something Sailor Jerry had no problem with. The real shift happened during the 60’s, when tattoos became aligned with the San Francisco hippie culture. At this time a new school of tattoos appeared, coming directly out of the hippie scene
Sailor Jerry didn’t live long enough to see tattooing become mainstream, and he practically died with his boots on (he had a heart attack while taking his new Harley Davidson on a test run; and succumbed later at home). But he already had mixed feelings about tattoos crossing into pop culture. “He was really anti-hippie, hated the whole movement-- in fact he was a right-wing libertarian,” notes Weiss. “In terms of music, he was more into Chinese opera. So if he was around today, I think he’d have mixed feelings. But he’d be blown away by the level of artistry that’s in tattooing now.”