Its inaugural lineup was legendary enough to launch an entire era of American tattooing, but Tattoo City in San Francisco will soon officially die, closing its doors for good at the end of 2024. Situated on Lombard Street, the shop was relaunched by Don Ed Hardy in 1991 with three unknown artists who quickly became powerhouses in their own right. Within a few years, the roster of Hardy, Dan Higgs, Freddy Corbin, and Eddy Deutsche was churning out painted flash and inked flesh that transcended the barrier between the street shop—buzzy, loud, and known for churning out sailor tattoos and carnival barking—and the upscale craftsmanship and customized experience of studio work. Those men have long left Tattoo City: Corbin started a legendary Oakland shop (Temple Tattoo), Deutsche tattoos out of Chad Koeplinger’s Buddhist enclave in Nashville (Adventure Tattoo), and Higgs disappeared from the industry entirely (he was always more of a poet, anyway). If tattooing is iconoclasm, fruitful collaboration between iconoclasts often has a shelf life.
While the average tattooer is aware of the Hardy-Higgs-Corbin-Deutsche quartet as if they were Gospel authors, the only name in the lineup that made the leap from subculture to pop culture was Hardy’s. He got famous for licensing his art to T-shirts made by somebody else, often worn by people with minimal connection to or sentiment for Hardy's work. Such are the perils of American fame.
A funny thing about subcultures is that by nature, their legacies are collected only in the hazy memories of the tradition’s participants. What happens when those memories fade entirely, when a compendium of the most important collected information about tattooing in the English language is ravaged by dementia? When the mind dies, so does the folklore. Perhaps that is why Francesca Passalacqua, Hardy’s business partner and wife of half a century, is nearing an emotional breaking point. “We’re being very open about Ed’s health,” she says over the phone while making soup. “At this point we have to be.”
Passalacqua goes on to describe an event in recent years, emblematic of Hardy’s faculties slipping away. Hardy had been paying a friend to warehouse mountains of books and memorabilia, but Hardy was the only one who knew about the arrangement. When that memory was lost, Passalacqua received a distressing phone call about the expiry of the arrangement for non-payment, and had no choice but to watch a portion of her husband’s life’s work get dumpstered.
While the loss of work was personally tragic, it is fairly typical of the tattooing trade and inherent to the difficulties in preservation of its history. A lot of the best stuff—not just Hardy’s—is already gone, lost to fires and theft, or bartered away for drug money or gambling debts, or simply trashed when a landlord reclaims a shop from a delinquent owner.