this is my wedding bouquet it was a really important part of my life and it just reminds me of it every day when it comes to body art Beauty really is skin deep putting a couple hours of pain but it's worth it why is it worth it just the art art that has made its way into galleries museums fashion shows even the cover of The New Yorker what made you want to make a documentary about tattoos well it started off as a photographic project outlaw bikers got tattoos sailors in Singapore eric schwartz made a film
about this very old and very new phenomenon this estimated fifteen percent of Americans have tattoos and I number rises to forty percent in the age group 26 to 40 I really found it fascinating the sincerity of the people how the imagery had nothing to do with what I thought by choosing images that celebrated their neighborhoods religion and loved ones the Chicano people of East LA had a key role in elevating black and gray to an art form a people's art form it's no wonder people seeking such personal and permanent art want to place their bodies
in the hands of classically trained fine artists you do oil painting you draw you do charcoal yes the whole gamut in 2009 Friday Jones open tattoo couch or located on New York City's Fifth Avenue I had seen a lot of my friend graduating college and they still wanted to get tattooed but we'd have to take him to us kind of an exposed street shop I thought that they deserved a serene environment in a place where they felt safe to talk about spirituality about pain so you've been doing this for 22 years what's the evolution you've
seen in the tattoo industry my clients are so much more fearless than they've ever been I can't they they come up with all sorts of envelope-pushing ideas ideas like 3d tattoos watercolor tattoos even glow in the dark tattoos the inking industry generates more than two billion dollars a year in revenue but tattoos have been around for centuries one of the oldest was discovered in the Italian Alps on a five thousand three hundred year old mummy his tattoos are all over places in his body that had evidence of things like arthritis so they were healing tattoos
tattoo historian Anna Friedman says the art often reflects what's going on in broader culture which is why for much of the 20th century it was soldiers and sailors exercising their right to bear arms the proud memory of the Yorktown's fighting days inspires her crew these tattoos tell the story anytime we have a war we get this desire of people to show their patriotism in a deep way a turning point for tattoos came with women's liberation certainly women were getting tattooed in the 60s and 70s as a way of breaking out of this mold of the
woman who gets told what to do and this man capitalized on the revolution that was in more panties and Gynecologists because a favorite spot for ladies to get tattooed was inside the bikini line mile Tuttle is an 83 year old tattoo artists often called the father of modern tattooing it was not my great artistic talents that got me where I'm at today but I was in everybody's favorite city CBS News without any flowers in its hair is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the hippie capital of the world as
hippies swayed to psychedelic rock in the 60s tattooing enjoyed a renaissance you had a tattoo you belong to sort of an elite club and in that Club tuttle emerged as the Grand Poobah inking the likes of Joan Baez the Allman Brothers and Janis Joplin it was her bracelet and heart that helped thrust the art into the spotlight the spotlight also shown on total landing on the pages of Rolling Stone Life magazine and the Bible of American business wall stree profile of me on the front page about a man that markets than probable product all of
a sudden the business world said well tattoos are cool these days tattoos are a ubiquitous product so we're gonna do and God closes a door he opens a window like Scott Eureka more than 45 million Americans have gone under the gun all this is symbolism of the two most important things in my life my faith and my family and while tattoos have become a kind of fine art for the masses they still come at a price about four hundred dollars an hour at Jones studio what do people expect from a tattoo artist today they expect
works of art on their skin
