7 h, mar 20, 2015 y - TELEGRAPH
Jonathan Shaw
Tattoo Pact With
Johnny Depp
Description:
I first met Johnny Depp in 1984. For decades I had been living in Brazil, where I had begun tattooing, and I had decided to move to Los Angeles. I knew a bunch of crazy musicians in a band called the Rock City Angels, who were all living in this historic building in Hollywood called the Fontenoy, and I started hanging out with those guys. They had a new guitar player, who turned out to be Johnny Depp. Back then, he was just some kid hanging out on the fringes of this bunch of drug addict rock’n’rollers.
A few years later I’d established myself as a fairly well known tattoo artist in New York, and Johnny had quit his TV series 21 Jump Street and taken the lead in a John Waters film, Cry-Baby. He came to New York in 1990, looked me up and invited me to the premiere of the film. That’s where I met Iggy Pop and Jim Jarmusch. The four of us gravitated together and became pretty much inseparable. Our usual meeting place was my tattoo studio, Fun City Tattoo, which is where this picture was taken.
Fun City Tattoo was an illegal tattoo parlour behind a boarded-up store front on the Bowery that you had to walk past bums and addicts to get to. It had no sign or anything – you’d call from the corner and I’d come and let you in.Inside, it was a colourful, crazy other world filled with antique tattoo memorabilia, shrunken heads from the Amazon in glass cases – just all kinds of weird shit covering every inch of the walls and ceiling. That became our clubhouse.
One day I was showing Johnny, Iggy and Jim my collection of antique tattoo design sheets. Iggy came across a skull and crossbones with the words death is certain around it. He became obsessed with that design. The idea was born that we would all get the same tattoo to commemorate our friendship. I wore a skull ring and, at around the same time, everybody decided they wanted a skull ring like mine. So we all wore this ring, we all got the same tattoo – and we became the Death Is Certain Club.
Added to timeline:
The Johnny Depp Chronology
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard Complete Timeline
The Johnny De...
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