Nick Colella

thanks everyone, i just bumped up the font and cleaned up the colors a bit..thanks for the input, i have so many old photos i am going to be putting up so look for added content. thanks for the replies

awesome story..if you just read that book on Pat marcy and the first ward, thats the book by the ex mob lawyer Robert Cooley i believe call the Chicago Outfit or something like that.. look in the index for Michael Colella..hes related

Yep as far as i have heard through stories the mob ran that whole area including the tattooing. Everyone kicked to them the tattooers, the dancers, the bookies, everyone. As far as mobsters go Accardo was the best. Never spent as much as a night in the clink and there's no cooler nickname than Joe Batters. He got it cuz of the severe baseball bat beatings he used to give!!! Below is a pic of Tatts Thomas and his wife at the time and Owen Jensen and Dainty Dotty this pic was supposedly taken on South State Street, like i said everyone was supposed to have been through there.

so with all this social networking Facebook, Shop Blogs,Twitter and all the other crap i had let me website fall to the way side, but recently i updated it and added a little tattoo history photo section I still need to tweak it a little more but for now its up and actually has some newer(within the last 2 years) photos. I think this LST thing kinda lite a fire for me to rework it http://www.lostsoul.com any input would be appreciated

Dari You and Sarah both..Ha!

Shane Thanks for getting me thinking about this. I agree with what you are saying about the popularity of tattoo then as to now. I do believe it was probably just as popular taking all your examples into consideration. A lot of us bitch about civilians being able to buy equipment off the internet but if I’m not mistaken Wagner and Waters where advertising their catalogs in the back of Popular Mechanics and other magazines. And Zeis had a mail order correspondence school back then. If there was a correspondence school the tattooers now would be in an uproar about it. I’m not sure about elsewhere in the country but the research I did on South State Street in Chicago showed that hundreds of tattooers had pass through Chicago and had set up shop to tattoo on South State Street, everyone had a turn at it, it was just as popular as the Bowery or the Pike. The South State Street levee as it was called was jammed full of arcades, burlesque shows, bars and flop houses, it was considered in the 30s, and 40s the worst red light district this country had ever seen, but what really got the neighborhood jam packed and the tattooers slammed was that in the middle of all of this was the Army and Navy recruiting stations. These recruits flooded the area everyday to enlist and then went back every two weeks on day weekend to indulge in all that life or South State had to offer until they were shipped out. In Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos Phil Sparrow talks about the constant flow of sailors to the neighborhood and how busy it was. So that’s just a small example of the popularity of tattooing at that time in a 4 block square area, image that across the entire country, war is good for business and at that time amazing for the tattoo business. As everyone knows Tuttle probably has the largest most vast collection of tattoo memorabilia anywhere, but I was told that he has somewhere of about 4000 hand painted sheets of flash , that’s inconceivable the amount of tattooing that was done off that flash. And most of it was from the early part of the 20th Century

9 times out of 10 that script is going on the ribs. it all started when the idiotic "tramp stamp" was coined, that screwed up everything. the lower back was a cake walk to tattoo, the ribs suck for microscopic letters

just stop by the shop and we can get you anywhere you wanna go..

whats up Deb!!!! hope you and Don are doing great!!!

There is no need for any kind of rematch. The will is strong Jill the arm an shoulder, not so much.

its a strange thing to me. I sit in either Chicago Tattoo or some other tattoo shop for 8+ hours a day at least 5 days a week and when people who i dont know or arent covered in tattoos come in with face tattoos it freaks the hell outta me. Im with Julio in that its hard to look someone in the eye with tear drops or crosses or in one case a 3 inch fully black and gray shaded Virgin of Guadalupe on the cheek come in and just wanna rap about tattoos or bend your ear or just whatever get directions or some shit. Im always fascinated by it, its like the ultimate physically altering tattoo. its super punk rock to me even if its on some gang banger. Its like when i started getting tattooed it seemed like there was a method to it an earning if you will, you had both upper arms done then you moved to the forearms and then full sleeves and then it was chest then back and stomach then it was all out you got your neck and hands neck and hands. its no longer like that, its what was coined by my friend Nikki Balls, its the "warped tour tattoos", its neck, throat, full forearms, hands and knuckles. when they take their shirts off you are blinded by the glare of their blank skin everywhere else. kinda strange, i remember what a big deal it was to get my first forearm tattoo, the visible one, it was as cool as getting my first tattoo on my upper arm. i didnt get my knuckles or hands done until i was tattooing for almost a dozen years, i thought yeah ive earned this shit now.