How is a machine tattoo different than a non-electric styles?

Michelle Myles in the Tattoo Museum, July 2024.

Michelle Myles is a tattoo artist originally from St. Louis but who has been tattooing on New York's Lower East Side since before it became legal again in NYC in 1997. She was the owner of Fun City (I remember Fun City II as the only visible tattoo shop in the Village when it was illegal, run by Jonathan Shaw). Later, she started Daredevil Tattoo with her partner Brad Fink on Ludlow Street, which at the time had a few hole in the wall bars that featured occasional bands, the all-ages punk club ABC NoRio, and heroin dealers. Then they moved down to an even shadier part of LES at Division St. and Canal near the East Broadway stop on the F train, Seward Park, and the old Jewish Daily Forward newspaper building. Today that neighborhood is bougie and much safer, without any obvious heroin dealing going on.

I took a tour of the tattoo history of the Bowery with Michelle, and she told me that she tattooed a bunch of the dealers, who then protected her in the neighborhood. Michelle is a registered NYC tour guide, and her husband is a tattoo collector. They have a Tattoo Museum featuring an Edison electric pen, which was modified to become the first electric tattoo machine by Samuel O'Reilly. O'Reilly is originally from England but set up shop in NYC in the early 20th century, and they have one of his machines, as well as hundreds of sheets of flash from celebrated early and mid-twentieth century artists from New York. I arrived late because of time zone issues when booking, but we hit it off, so she squeezed in the full tour. It helps that I used to be a tour guide for the Lower Eastside Tenement Museum, so I already knew the history of the social and architectural histories of the neighborhood and  could skip to the tattooing.

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Thomas Edison's electric pen was the basis for the invention of the electric tattoo machine. Photographed at the NYC Tattoo Museum.

​Michelle and I are the same age, both came from the Midwest to New York around the same time (she came a few years before me), and did our times in the music scene before settling down into history and intellectual pursuits, so we had a grand time talking shop as she took me to the Bowery and showed me where Charlie Wagner had his shop, where Lew the Jew had his shop, where Apache Harry had his shop (also Jewish fyi), and the list goes on. These shops were in the backs of saloons, barber shops, and dentists and only occasionally were stand-alone businesses. She talked a lot about the role of the elevated train over the Bowery making it a dingy place, which I recall from Michael McCabe's book from the 1980s, New York City Tattoo.

Tattooing existed in New York and other cities before it became electrified, but it certainly took off as an industry with Edison's and O'Reilly's inventions. As I learned from a recent webinar by Chuck Eldridge of Tattoo Archive, O'Reilly was one of several people tinkering with Edison's patent and simply the first to patent a device of his own. Tattooing has been practiced without electricity for thousands of years, but in the 19th century, numerous inventors were toying with ways to electrify tattooing. The now well-established lore is that after Thomas Edison invented the electric pen to automate filling out forms in triplicate, a number of tinkerers rushed to refine it into a tattoo machine. The first successful patent was given to Samuel O’Reilly.

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In Samoan handtap tattooing, the striking of the 'au with the sausau with two hands creates the same activity the electric tattoo gun does. An artists can therefore hold the tattoo machine in one hand and stretch the skin taut with the other hand. Samoan tattooists require what are called stretchers or pullers (toso in Samoan).

​What is different about the electric tattoo machine? Electric machine tattooing is different simply in the mechanization that speeds up certain aspects of tattooing. The principle of the electric tattoo machine is that something is moving the needle back and forth at a rapid pace. Tattoo machines can be made from anything with a moving part, which is why so many prison tattoo machines are made from such devices as CD players or electric razors. In the electric tradition, the whole machine is held in the artist’s drawing handing and operated with a foot or finger switch. Non-electric styles achieve the same movement by hand. In the Pacific, one hand holds the tattooing comb (an ‘au in Samoan), and the other hand taps the pattern in with a rod (a sausau in Samoan). In Japan tebori tattooing, the pigment is poked in from the end of a wooden or metal stick of various sizes (called sashibo or nomi). With stick and poke, one administers tattoos by hand with a simple needle or tattoo needle bundle (tattoo needles come pre-made and easily obtainable via mail-order) hafted to a pencil or chopstick.

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