NY Post Reviews Tattoo Machine

In “Tattoo Machine,” Jeff Johnson gives a salty tour of the shops that nervous mothers once forbade their sons and daughters from visiting. As the co-owner of Sea Tramp Tattoo Company in Portland, Oregon, and a practicing artist who has wielded an ink-and-needle gun that “smacks the skin between 60 and 120 times per second” for decades, Johnson’s got an endless supply of stories to tell.

There’s the homesick Lone Star State G.I. who drew a copy of his state’s flag from memory for the artist to create and then returned later shouting, “This ain’t the flag of Texas, and I ain’t no f – - – in’ Portugese!”

Musing on dozens of cases of surprise tattoos gone wrong, Johnson notes, “It’s amazing how many people can’t spell their spouse’s name.”

Woven throughout Johnson’s funny, outlandish and sometimes disturbing anecdotes about drug-addled tattooists who fall asleep while blotching the arms of customers, scam artists who promise sex for services rendered, and the still-at-large serial killer who embazoned his victims’ names on his body, is an intricately rendered history of a once-marginal service industry.