When Don Ed Hardy left art school with a degree in printmaking in the ’60s, he decided not to pursue a career in the academic art world but to practice a form of art that had fascinated him from the age of ten: tattooing. Since then, he has made a name as an innovator (with his fusion of the American and Japanese visual traditions), a shopkeeper (founding the first Japanese-style private studio in America), and a chronicler, with his groundbreaking TattooTime/Hardy Marks Books, with titles such as Music and Sea Tattoos and Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos. Along with a few other pioneers, Hardy has pushed his medium past the stereotypes (the biker, the drunken sailor) to a socially accepted form of personal expression and, sometimes, a fashion accessory.

In the last decade or so, Hardy has concentrated more and more on painting, and recently hung up his tattoo guns—though he continues to mentor the artists at his San Francisco shop, Tattoo City. At the same time, he’s licensed his work to a designer who has put his images on T-shirts, shoes, and caps. He’s even partnered with a company to start a line of Don Ed Hardy temporary tattoos.

I spoke to Hardy by phone while he was visiting San Francisco from his Hawaiian home. The conversation has been edited for space because, as Hardy has been a witness to so much of American tattoo history, he knows his stuff, loves to share it, and, as he readily admits, in the grand tradition of the tattoo artist, he can “bullshit endlessly.”

—Matthew Simmons

I. “ANY COLOR, SO LONG AS IT’S BLACK”

THE BELIEVER: You’ve referred to tattooing’s “unprecedented popularity on a global scale.” Can you talk about how it got there? DON ED HARDY: It’s a twofold thing. Part of it for me, along with the formal means of getting the ink in the skin, was the challenge of social engineering—to get people who would be interested in having more unusual tattoos and having more personal tattoos. That framework did not exist. It was stratified into—for lack of a better word—the “lower” orders of society. When I started doing tattoos, the bikers were barely getting them. It was strictly a military thing, and it had been pretty much that way, or definitely a working class thing, since the beginning of the twentieth century. There were people who had a formal education and responsible jobs and made a lot of money who got tattoos, but it was a really risky thing, underground. And what was available was not very artistically done. So when I got into it,...