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Tattooing has become a pastime and profession for people of all walks of life and it is made possible and less painful through the development of high quality tattoo guns. Tattoos proudly display experiences that the grey flannel world is too afraid of to try much less get emblazoned on their arm for anyone to see. Some of the best machines are just as beautiful as the artwork they can create and although modern technology has found its way into today’s machines they are still roughly the same design as they were when sailors got tattoos in Asian ports during World War Two.
By far the prettiest and most durable tattoo machines were handmade during and after the last Great War. They were often cast from melted down iron cookware and then machined into viable instruments for tattooists. Since they were all generally handmade they varied greatly but all followed the same general principle of having a balanced machine that could quickly insert ink into the skin and last for as long as the tattoos they created.
Even today the best machines are still handmade from heavy, high quality metals. These machines are the workhorse of the tattooist and a broken machine could put a serious damper on the extra curricular activities of the tattoo artist as well as the person being tattooed. While a great artist can use a poor quality machine and still get good results many tattooists today still prefer the old style tattoo guns (which no respectable tattooist will ever call a gun, it is a machine) that are heavy, loud and almost indestructible.
Some of the most beautiful machines were hand made by artists such as Percy Waters, Paul Rogers, and O. Jensen but the invention of the modern tattoo machine is actually credited to Thomas Edison although his “stencil-pens” were not originally intended for inserting ink into the skin. They were adapted by Samuel O’Reilly fifteen years after its invention. Twenty days after O’Reilly filed for a patent on his rotary based version a man named Thomas Riley filed a patent that is the basis for the modern electromagnetically driven tattoo machines of today and it was based off of the electric doorbell.
The art of tattooing has been developed for over 2000 years in Japan making the tattoo gun a very new invention in the long and illustrious life of tattoos. While the first devices were simply hollow needles inserted one by one into the skin the future of tattooing may not involve needles at all. Experiments with lasers are producing some interesting and promising results in both the application and removal of tattoos although almost all tattoos are made with modern machines. This age old art is far from being perfected especially among western artists who have only been exposed to this art form for a hundred years. The patience of a traditional Japanese tattooist is extraordinary and rarely found in western cultures.
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