07/24/2026
When I escaped down to Florida in 1989, tattooing was still illegal in all five boroughs of NYC, and had been since 1961. I didn’t get into punk rock until I started working, hell, I sent four seasons painting and performing at community theaters, and despite that I had no problems with needles, wink wink, nudge nudge, tattoos were pretty far off my radar.
Kids born before the internet, or reality TV, won’t understand what tattoos meant at that time. They were dangerous. Regular people encountered them on relatives who’d shipped off to foreign wars, and had seen horror that they’d never share in polite societies. Edgier people might fall in with bikers, or musicians, or brush shoulders against underground subcultures as far from mainstream 9-5 workplaces as other countries. Piercing in particular, was in part fueled by both the gay and B**M subcultures, and was progressive in embracing those minorities as part of their foundational frameworks, loooonng before it was trendy to do so.
Florida in the late 80s was its own world. I was shocked that there were things they had in New York that just never made their way down to the F-L-A. In that, many sections of the state seemed to be in perpetual states of playing catch up. Music was a good example, although the fact that so many acts toured cross country, but hooked a right after playing Atlanta and headed out west, thinking that another twenty hours there and back to Miami wasn’t worth the payoff, helped light the fires in the indy DIY scene to start bands, book out of state acts, and to create our own music scenes apart from the labels and the major agencies. And we did pretty well, Florida would go on to produce bands like Hot Water Music, Against All Authority, Further Seems Forever, Shai Hulud, Dashboard Confessional, Saigon Kick, No Fraud, Psycho Tribe, Genitortures, Deicide, Less Than Jake, Against Me!, Underoath, Poison The Well, New Found Glory, Morbid Angel, Obituary, Death, Savatage, (Tampa Bay, Death Metal capital of the World!) Magadog, Pork Pie Tribe, SkaHumbug, The Usuals, and of course, Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids.
Florida was a funny place to get clean. The FBI cited that Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville as always being in the top ten crime cities, and that they claimed 90% of all narcotics distributed in the US flowed through Florida borders. You could feel that in our all night volunteer sessions. This intersected with our passion for music, as amid all the myriad new genres being birthed, from acid house, techno, grind core, speed metal, industrial, all the different goth splinters, third wave ska, ska-punk, ska-core, rocksteady, dub, riot girl, q***r core, to say nothing of the crowded mainstream radio scene, straight edge was having its day. Birthed on the west coast as a reaction to punk icons dying from overdoses, straight edge solidified in DC at the Dischord House, the headquarters for Minor Threat, Teen Idles, SOA, Youth Brigade, Fugazi, Jawbox, and the underrated Nation of Ulysses. Being freshly clean, and surprised that there was life after suicidal mania, we did all we could to support our local bands. I was happy to stay up all night drawing flyers, like my poster heroes, Rick Griffin and Stanley Mouse, and go out at all hours staple gunning or what pasting as many as we could afford to print.
These flyers would evolve into screen printed posters. At first, a thing that we’d never think about. Those kinds of posters had been the purview of the dreaded HIPPIE, the nemesis of all things punk. But genius printer and skateboarding demigod Lindsay Kuhn had the brilliant idea of taking those grungy cut and paste flyers, blow them up big, color separate them, and screen print them just like our Free Love Brothers and done in ages past. Soon, the world would be collecting work from Frank Kozik, Coop, Mark Arminski, and an entire new generation of poster mavericks. I’m glad to call them friends.
A funny sidenote to these trips down memory lane: I can’t tell you how many of my posters have been tattooed on to people, but not by me! Or, I’ve even had clients seek me out as a poster artist, but then wanted other artist’s posters tattooed on them. I still don’t know how to feel about that as a tattooists, but anytime I’m in a dark venue, and someone is un******ng to show me the piece they’ve worn for years, how can you not love that?
If you’re in the area, or can make the rip down, hit me up, so we can get you into the schedule, and I can work up any custom designs or specialty art you’d like to get. Again, thank you to all the Seppuku Ronin who’ve supported us since 2005, and I hope to see you there. Domo arigato gozaimasu for the opportunity, and be good to each other!
