What is Tattoo Flash?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Shotsie Gorman. I am here as a tattoo artist, a professional tattoo artist, for Expert Village. In a tattoo studio, when one goes into a tattoo studio, generally speaking, there are displays of images everywhere in the place. They’re on the walls, in some places the ceiling, they’re in frames, they’re in books. These are called flash. The flash are a kind of code of tattoo images that have been around for a very long time. Some of them actually come out of very ancient ideas and ancient symbols, most of which the meaning has been lost in our culture. But flash actually comes from the point in which tattoo artists were always itinerate. There were really no settled tattoo shops in the early part of the 20th century. Tattoo artists would move with groups, like carnivals and circuses. They would travel with the military, so if the military decided they were going to move a large base of naval recruits to a particular place, all the tattoo artists would go to that place to work. Because military tattooing has always been a strong tradition. So what you have to do is decide from this flash. I was saying the history of flash comes from the carnival, the girls who used to do the coochie dances, you know the kind of sexy dances to draw people into the carnival, would expose parts of themselves. They would expose a little bit of their breast or a little bit of thigh, things they weren’t supposed to do. That was called flashing. So it still has that same connotation. Flashing, taking ones clothes off and exposing it quickly. And the tattoo artists would sit there, and they would have their books of designs kind of folded up, and when the crowd came into the carnivals, they would pull a string and all these pictures would drop down. They were really brightly colored and many many ornate and very exotic looking drawings, and it was called flashing the crowd. And that would bring people in to look at what was going on. Usually they would have a woman who was in the carnival or the side show who was heavily tattooed and scantily clad. So she would do a little dance, talk about how she was probably kidnapped by aborigines and forcibly tattooed, and married the chief’s son or something. You know, some crazy story that came out of really bad 19th century archeology or something. And so flash is in the studio. One gets to choose. But if you choose a design off the wall that way, you can be assured that 90 percent of the studios in the United States have exactly the same design, with the same set of colors. So that means if you choose this design, chances are you are going to be sitting at the diner on Sunday morning having breakfast, and the guy next to you is going to have the same tattoo, tattooed the same way with the same color. But I say that with some reservation, because the second level of this consumer information should be the quality of the tattoo. "