Manolith Salutes: Sailor Jerry

By Ned Hepburn on April 23rd, 2009

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Sailor Jerry was a tattoo artist. Saying that he was just a tattoo artist, however, might get your lights punched out in certain circles.

He revolutionized tattooing; not just making new needle formations to cause less damage to the skin, but also taking from the Japanese a level of intricacy and that had yet to be seen by Western audiences and fusing it with Americana – thus creating the tattoo culture that we know and love today. He became the figurehead of American tattooing – with his simplistic but iconic designs still being tattooed today. His style is so ingrained into the American psyche that some younger tattooed people don’t even know that they have Sailor Jerry designs on them: they just picked them (somewhat naively) because they thought it was a standard design. Take the swallow and the nautical star and the anchor designs and you’ve already got three Sailor Jerry designs that have been tattooed onto thousands if not a million people.

And for someone who only really tattooed for about 11 years in Honolulu, far far away from the mainland, his legacy made a huge impact on the world of tattoo culture.

At 19, Norman Collins set out to become a Sailor, and adopted the moniker “Sailor Jerry”. He travelled the world in the US Navy and got his first tattoos while in Hawaii, where he would later set up shop. Keep in mind that getting a tattoo wasn’t as common nor trendy as it is now: it was regarded at the time as relatively underground, and sailors would get tattooed to show off to their friends at home, and women were barely if ever tattooed. However, it was his fusion of humor and professionalism and the fact that Jerry was ultimately a very manly kind of guy – a man’s man who enjoyed the pleasure and company of buxom women and a bottle of rum – that ultimately made him a legend. He drew images of curvaceous women that became so imitated that he had to resort to printing ‘The Original Sailor Jerry’ on his business cards; his swallow design recently went through a huge “it” moment in the early 2000’s.

His legacy lives on though his proteges Don “Ed” Hardy and Mike Malone, who created Sailor Jerry LTD in the early 90’s and have been making shirts, shoes, and glassware all with iconic Sailor Jerry designs on them. And let’s not forget the Sailor Jerry rum, a rum so good that it may make you think twice about ever going back to whiskey.