Revolver and Inked have partnered to bring you stories on some of the world's best tattooers and tattoo shops, including New York City's East Side Ink. CLICK HERE to book your consultation at East Side Ink now.
"Do you want an awful story about Mark Ruffalo?" tattooer Josh Lord is laughing as he pulls up his pant leg to show off his "junk leg," where he keeps the pieces done on him by friends and famous clients, including five of the six Avengers — minus Ruffalo who chickened out. He recounts the tale of attending the 2018 opening of Avengers: Infinity War with his fresh ink — a small tattoo placed on his leg line by line by each of the cast members — and The Hulk himself tracing over the lines with his bare finger in an attempt to guess which person contributed each piece of the puzzle.
"I assume it is probably a very clean finger, but it really doesn't matter," says Lord. "It's still a dirty finger to me touching a fresh tattoo, which is exactly what we want people not to do! Luckily, I had a stiff vodka drink and just dumped it on it, which also does not actually save you from infection, just for the record. So, I got fingered by Mark Ruffalo. [Laughs]"
"Part of this job is being a bit of a germaphobe," Lord continues with a smile, while sitting in front of the pristine exposed brick walls and carefully arranged tattoo stations in the basement of East Side Ink, the New York City shop he co-owns with industry vets Yadira Mendez-Firvida and Jen Terban-Hertell.
Lord's attention to artful details (and cleanliness) is also reflected in the shop's main first-floor room above, which features a minimalist open-design layout that is more easily likened to an art gallery than a chaotic street shop. The studio's atmosphere is modern and spotless — full of serene white and gray tones and absent of flash designs typically displayed on most shop walls. Yet it's still brimming with the familiar sounds of buzzing tattoo machines and lively chatter from tattooers and clients.
Nowadays, Lord might be best known for his East Village storefront, impeccably detailed black-and-grey realism pieces or impressive roster of celebrity clients, but two decades ago he was just another young kid with some stick 'n' poke experience hustling to learn the ropes and catch a break in the big city.
"I moved to New York about 20 years ago … I had like 600 bucks in my pocket and really had no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to live," says Lord on his inauspicious entrance to the Big Apple from Rochester, New York in the Nineties. "I got my first real tattoo job almost immediately … luckily."
Back then, tattooing in New York was a vastly different practice. In 1961, the city banned the practice citing the prevention of hepatitis B. Rumor has it there were other factors in play, like "cleaning up" the city before the 1964 World Fair or a love triangle starring one tattooer's wife and her affair with a city official.
Of course, artists still managed to survive during the ban, working out of back-alley dives and private shops. Among those artists was world-renowned tattooer Andrea Elston, who had been tattooing in covert locations since 1992. When tattooing finally became legal again in New York City in 1997, she opened East Side Ink's original street shop on 2nd street between 1st avenue and Avenue A. It was around this time — as the outlaw artists were rising up from the underground to rebuild the city as a hotbed of tattoo culture — that Lord landed in NYC.
Lord got his start at Fun City, the famous long-standing street shop on St. Mark's Place in the East Village. While the neighborhood's punk past has largely gone the way of corporate interest and high-rise office spaces over the past few decades, Lord recalls the scene in all its gritty renown.
"The East Village was a very different place back then," he says. "Fun City is a really great shop right now … but it was quite a sketchy and relatively frightening place back then."
Lord took to his job dutifully, working seven days a week and pulling 12-hour shifts learning his craft. "I didn't really have any teachers," he continues, "so at the time I was just trying to fake it until I eventually knew what I was doing. I was obsessed, and I loved that place on St. Mark's ... It was really wild and interesting."
The foundation for Lord's tattoo obsession came long before his DIY days in the New York scene, when as a child he discovered that his uncle had self-tattooed his own name in pointillism on his wrist. Lord remembers the work as being "absolutely terrible," but the impression it left on him was more than skin-deep.
"He's a really cool guy; always inspired me," Lord remembers fondly. "I remember that, at like five or six, thinking it was cool. It never really went away. Even like my very first tattoo, which I still have — it's this dot [I tattooed on my] wrist at probably 12 years old. All the cool kids had something in my neighborhood."
Soon he graduated to tattooing his friends, marking them with rudimentary skulls and roses in India ink. By the time he was 23, he decided that he wanted to pursue tattooing as a career path, which led him to New York, where he jumped headfirst into the East Village scene. After grinding away at Fun City, he eventually landed a gig at East Side Ink. It was there that his true artistic and business skills were honed, thanks to the generosity of Elston and other tattooers including Nalla Smith and Patrick Conlin and peers like Scott Campbell.
"Everyone stands on the shoulders of the giants before them," Lord says deferentially. "When I was coming up and tattooing, there were a lot of the beginnings of the subtlety that's in the art, but not tons of tiny detail that I've kind of been obsessed with for most of my career."
His modesty shines through while discussing his early days in the business, and he reiterates how undeserving he felt to be working with such high-level artists considering his lack of formal training.
"I wasn't nearly as good as any of those guys at the time. It was still early in my career, and they were all very experienced," says Lord. "They saw something in me I guess, and took me in. I really was in a wonderful shop that was above my abilities and did everything I could to kind of earn my place there."
Over the years Nalla Smith eventually took over ownership of East Side Ink, but Elston remained a tattooer there until the original spot closed and the bulk of the crew went to work at MacDougal Street Tattoo Company, a shop that has since closed.
By 2007 Lord was well into his own as a tattooer, and he partnered with Mende-Firvida and Terban-Hertell to resurrect East Side Ink following the crew's tenure at MacDougal Street. They moved ESI it to a new location on Avenue B, and staffed it with artists that would continue the shop's legacy of providing high-quality custom ink in any style: from bold traditional to Japanese styles to delicate, elaborate black-and-grey work. While Andrea Elston had surrendered ownership long before, she stuck around those first few years at the "new" spot before moving to Texas where Lord says fondly, "last I heard, she was enjoying life as a cowgirl and doing beautiful tattooed leatherwork," before adding, "She started it all!"
"I definitely love doing more detailed pieces," he says of the fine-line style for which he's particularly known. Once controversial for its ability to withstand aging, Lord believes more folks are gravitating toward his style since maintenance is something folks no longer shy away from.
"The challenge with tattooing is getting something to look good for the lifetime of the person who has it," Lord continues. "Detail is a really controversial thing. You could put a certain amount of detail in the past, and it potentially aged terribly." But now that tattoo ink has gotten better and more folks are willing to come in for tattoo touch-ups, the strict "bold will hold" policy of staunch traditionalists no longer applies.
While he can work in nearly any style, delicate and elaborate work is the main draw for his would-be clients. He also prefers to work primarily in black and gray, citing the shading and line work of the dual chromatic style as "more fun" to pull off.
Throughout his career, Lord cut his teeth, and established his reputation, tattooing people from every walk of life: from East Village punks and international collectors to movie stars and rock-and-roll royalty.
His first celebrity client was none other than Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. The musician invited Lord to his familial compound in Massachusetts, where he smoothed out some of the guitarist's older tattoos and added to existing work on his arm. He also tattooed jewels on Perry's wife and comic book art on his son, and has the pleasure of experiencing the musician's self-referential dad jokes firsthand.
"This is a true story," Lord begins with a grin. "When they showed me around the house, he actually turned to me and said, 'Walk this way,' which still cracks me up to this day."
Another famous musician from Lord's long resume was Dee Dee Ramone. Lord calls it "just some scratcher stuff. I think we corrected one or two. I wouldn't even count it as tattooing, but he was so fun to hang out with!" The punker also gave Lord a few "bass lessons" after becoming acquainted. "I had an old acoustic ovation bass that I would practice on in between customers. I was there 12-hour days, 7 days a week at the time—I practically lived there. He gave me some really basic pointers a few times and would show off for me and whoever else was there at the time. Bass lessons is an exaggeration, but it still counts!"
As with most trends in fashion and lifestyle, the rock-and-rollers were followed by the actors who worship them. And Lord has had no shortage of highly visible TV and movie stars. He quickly rattles off a roster that includes Cate Blanchett, Thor actress Jamie Alexander, Susan Sarandon (with whom he built such a good rapport that she eventually brought in her whole family for his services), and the aforementioned Avengers.
The Avengers gig grew out of Lord's personal connection to actress Scarlett Johansson, on whom he'd already done a floral backpiece. Before the April 2018 release of Avengers: Infinity War, Johansson asked her castmates: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo to join her in getting matching tattoos to commemorate the occasion. All except Ruffalo agreed, and each received a small custom geometric piece designed in partnership with Lord. What's more, after each session, each actor then switched places with Lord, grabbed the tattoo machine and inked a line of the Avengers tattoo onto his junk leg.
"The Avengers tattoo was so much fun, but also there's a lot of pressure," says Lord, "I'm a huge fan and so getting to do, and design … let me just say that getting six of the most famous people in the film industry to agree on one design was difficult and trying."
"They gave me parameters that included delicate enough for the ladies — and Chris Hemsworth — and masculine enough for everybody else," he continues with a laugh. "There's a symbol for everybody in the movie hidden in there. Their initials are also all hidden in there … Everyone was involved in the creative process. Everyone wanted to have something to commemorate their time together, their characters."
While the Avengers collaborative tattoo came off without a hitch, Lord hasn't always been so lucky. In 2009, pop star (and empire-building Fenty guru) Rihanna came into East Side Ink for a piece from another artist. While Lord wasn't familiar with her at the time, he let the superstar tattoo his leg with a small umbrella featuring a small "r" and "2," as it was the second of three umbrella tattoos she'd do that evening. The event set off a media firestorm when gossip news sites caught wind that New York City's health department was investigating the shop because of Rihanna's rogue unlicensed tattooing.
"We were raided by the health department immediately after that whole incident and then there was just like a huge media storm… [about us] getting in trouble, being fined, but none of that actually happened," explains Lord. "She did not get fined; she wasn't here when they raided us anyway. It was a non-story that they made into a huge story, but in a way it was really a wild to watch the media storm unfold. It was probably publicity we could have never paid for otherwise."
Lord's experience with movie stars also isn't just confined to inking (or being inked by) them off set — he's also frequently responsible altering actors' appearances for their roles on screen.One of the first films he worked on was director M. Night Shyamalan's live action The Last Airbender, adapted from a Nickelodeon cartoon of the same name.
"It was very difficult to try to come up with something iconic to match the simplicity and beauty of the cartoon," says Lord. "We probably went through thousands of different designs and options before finally settling on something that looked kind of magical. Whatever you may think about the film, I'm very proud of the tattoos, and that experience opened up a bunch of doors."
One of those doors led to working on Season One of HBO's Emmy Award-winning crime anthology True Detective, where Lord's obsession with detail was utilized to its fullest as he set out to fulfill the director's marching orders to "make the tattoos look like they're from the Nineties, really make it look like they got them in jail or like they should be on bikers."
A more comical experience manifested with the 2015 Tina Fey and Amy Poehler comedy Sisters, which saw Lord take on a project of massive proportions: professional wrestler John Cena's neck.
"When I designed his tattoos, I measured him carefully," says Lord. "The [manufacturers of the fake tattoos] were sure that I had accidentally doubled the size or that it was for his waist, but I kept reassuring them. I measured him over and over again. It's just that he is a massively huge character."
Lord's biggest challenge, outside of convincing folks Cena's neck was truly that large, was coming up with a design that made the clean-cut actor look believably scary. The final design was a "realistic but comical" grimacing skull with flaming tendrils that extend onto Cena's face. The black-and-grey design is expertly faded to appear natural, and achieves providing Cena with the laughably macho look the crew wanted without detracting from his chiseled good looks.
Beyond Lord's notable headline-worthy projects, the artists remains committed to providing a solid and reputable establishment at East Side Ink, where tattoo-seekers of all experiences and lifestyles can come for work they're proud to wear permanently. The top priority for the studio is hiring talented and personable artists to put potential clients at ease. He iterates, "First and foremost, we, we have wonderful artists. They're very, very talented, but talent isn't enough. We have a very tight group here. It's like family, so you need to be a good person."
Customer service is of utmost importance to East Side Ink, and a front desk person will always be available to greet customers and look over or listen to the ideas they've brought with them. Lord recalls the old-school shops in the city, with their red walls and intimidating windows through which a "relatively rude" person would greet clients before they were "dragged into the back and to a scary corner."
"I like to think that we were pretty much the first shop in the city to open it up for you to see what was going on," he notes, likening the process to his past working in the food industry. "In all of my previous restaurant experience prior to tattooing, I always liked the open quality and being able to see what the cooks are doing. Is that a nice kitchen? Are they clean? What do the chefs look like? If you go into a Japanese restaurant in the city, you can usually see exactly what's going on, right? If they can't, if the restaurant has like a scary little back room, how do you know what's going on? So when you come in to our shop, you'll see everything. You'll see what's going on, you'll see people drawing, and you'll see the artists' areas."
He also affirms that first timers are just as welcome as seasoned collectors, and the size of the piece doesn't make the tattoo any less important: "I feel like that's a thing that a lot of shops have been kind of dismissive and rude to people who are just getting something smaller and meaningful to them. We really want to do the right tattoo for you — always the right tattoo for you. That's what matters most."
Revolver and Inked have partnered to bring you stories on some of the world's best tattooers and tattoo shops, including New York City's East Side Ink. CLICK HERE to book your consultation at East Side Ink now.
