FEMALE SPEAKER: Have you always been an artist?
THOM DEVITA: What'd you say?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Have you always been an artist?
THOM DEVITA: Yeah, for about 40 years.
JOHN WYATT: He's the greatest tattooer.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Greatest tattooer?
[INAUDIBLE].
THOM DEVITA: I can do that also.
FEMALE SPEAKER: You can, yeah.
THOM DEVITA: Every shop I went in, I'd tell them I'm deVita.
And they never heard of deVita.
You walk out like you're an idiot, you know?
Who the hell is deVita?
JOHN WYATT: And now they're honored to have you.
THOM DEVITA: Oh, let me finish.
JOHN WYATT: When they meet Thom, they will realize
they've never met anybody like him before.
He's probably the most different person, without
trying to be different, of anybody I've ever met.
He's so many different things.
He's a tattoo artist, but he's also a fine artist.
I think he's one of the true originals.
THOM DEVITA: But you've got these lines in here anyway
from the cardboard.
MALE SPEAKER: The corrugation, yeah.
I really like it.
There's a good, strong iconic strike to it.
Where in the city were you located?
THOM DEVITA: On the Lower East Side.
MALE SPEAKER: Very nice.
THOM DEVITA: It wasn't nice when I went there.
MALE SPEAKER: I guess it's nice today, right?
It's all about [INAUDIBLE].
THOM DEVITA: Thanks for coming in.
Take a card.
MALE SPEAKER: Wow, deVita.
NICK BUBASH: What I try to get across about Thom deVita to
anybody that's interested--
he wasn't just a tattoo artist, he was
an artist who tattooed.
It was all one big ball of wax with him.
Everything he did was art--
the way he lived, the way he talked, the way he thought,
what he did, where he went.
The tattoos were just as important as the floor.
And then it all came up on onto his body.
I mean, it was everywhere.
JOHN WYATT: Have you ever done commercial art, Thom?
THOM DEVITA: Yeah, tattooing.
Art that pays.
JOHN WYATT: When's the last time you
set up a tattoo machine?
THOM DEVITA: Not too long ago.
Last year when I was [INAUDIBLE]
I'd write my name on tattooers.
JOHN WYATT: Aren't you going to a convention this year?
THOM DEVITA: Yeah, in October.
JOHN WYATT: October?
BUBBA REEVES: I knew that Thom, he wasn't wanting to do
a whole lot more conventions.
But I knew that his book had came out, and his wife, Jenny,
had lost her job.
And so Thom kind of had to be the money maker again.
And Ed loves to have him out here, and so I've kind of been
helping Thom out with his travels and
his sales and stuff.
He sells his artwork.
He still works all day, everyday,
just like he tattooed.
But now he does it on paper.
So he has plenty of artwork to sell of tattoo stencils and
rubbings and stuff like that.
When I first seen Thom's stuff, I was wanting to get my
back tattooed from him or something real big.
But by that time, he was already done tattooing.
I think it's been about 10 years since he's
tattooed for a living.
Well, the main thing, when you get a tattoo by Thom, is he's
going to have to like you.
You're going to have to pass this thing that you want to
get a tattoo from him, and you understand
that his hand shakes.
I tell them my hands shake and I'm drunk,
and they don't care.
BUBBA REEVES: His signature is what he does.
That's his last name with his birth date.
Since he's been tattooing, he tattoos for
$30 always, I heard.
And so he charges the tattooers that get tattooed by
him $30 for his name.
The first time I heard about Thom was through the "Tattoo
Times," and I was like man, this guy's
doing something special.
ED HARDY: When we did this "Tattoo Times" series in
magazines, my primary goal with that was to enlighten
people, make people realize that there was a lot more
depth and history and complexity to tattooing than
anybody realized.
And then finally, by the fifth issue, I was like, oh my god,
I've got to do something on Malone, who was
a very close friend.
And he introduced me to deVita.
And do a piece on deVita, because deVita's was such an
important guy.
Hopefully, it woke people up to who he was.
Culturally, it was a subterranean practice, and
deVita was sub-subterranean.
ROBERT RYAN: When people say that someone has a cult
following, I think that people that know and get it really
appreciate his work and really have a lot of love for it.
And I think it flies over the heads of a lot
of people as well.
I was a deVita devotee from the beginning.
It just unlocked this whole world that I was already
totally into of the Lower East Side of New York.
There's this creative energy there that I think Thom's work
definitely emanates.
There's not a lot of care-taking in trying to nail
each line so everything's perfect.
But I think he captures the essence and the energy of a
tattoo design.
NICK BUBASH: It had an earthiness to it.
It had soul to it.
Thom characterizes it as folk art.
He says all tattooing is folk art.
That's right from his mouth.
MALE SPEAKER: Now they've turned into things that the
Metropolitan Museum could display proudly, some of the
tattoos that are being done.
THOM DEVITA: But it's still folk art.
MALE SPEAKER: Those humble beginnings.
THOM DEVITA: But it's still folk art.
MALE SPEAKER: But once it gets put on your body, it
becomes folk art.
THOM DEVITA: Instantly.
Some of them are real folk art.
I work with traditional tattoo designs.
I like repeating myself.
That's why I like tattooing.
It's just drawing the same panthers on a hundred guys.
I have a hard time copying what someone else had done.
But I'd start off with the Coleman design, and I would
fill it in a little differenty, because you just
can't copy.
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, I got one on my leg.
I only have one piece of his.
It's on the back of this leg.
He did it all with a shader.
It was from a design on his wall that was some kind of
Catholic image.
CLAYTON PATTERSON: His flash would be on pieces of wood.
Have you seen his flash?
JOHN WYATT: Yeah.
THOM DEVITA: Here's a piece that was
done on Fourth Street.
And that's my flash from 30 years ago.
ANGELO SCOTTO: At the time, you didn't think people would
get those tattoos, you know what I mean?
But it was art.
I said, wow.
I said, it's totally different from what we were used to.
That was, you went from Spaulding and Rogers' flash to
Thom deVita's designs, which was a total transformation.
Like overnight, you could blink your
eyes, you'd say, wow.
MALE SPEAKER: That's probably the most different piece of
flash I've ever seen.
CLAYTON PATTERSON: Part of what this whole dialogue is
about is transformation of tattooing from kind of a
classic, conservative, traditional style to
eventually it breaks out into this whole new matrix.
NICK BUBASH: I never thought of them as high art.
When I went to deVita's place, and I saw what he was doing,
that I started thinking of as art.
He's still kind of esoteric.
You have to know what you're talking about.
You have go into the history of it.
You have to find out the early beginnings of modern tattooing
to understand we're all standing on the shoulders of
other people.
And a lot of us are standing on the shoulders of Thom.
ROBERT RYAN: The thing that really struck me about
deVita's place in tattooing was he wasn't a biker, he
wasn't military, he wasn't carny-- he was just a guy
making his art.
And it was rooted in traditional tattooing, but it
was his take on it.
And the people that he influenced in tattooing after
that are definitely a lot of the people that I also looked
up to as well as Thom--
guys like Ed, and Mike Malone, Nick Bubash, Tux Farrar, Dan
Higgs, Cliff Raven, too.
No, none of those guys come from that lineage of biker,
carny, hot rod.
It's just like this almost poetic approach to tattooing
that you didn't really have before Thom.
And for Thom, it even went further, because he was more
into the experience.
And I think that goes back a lot further than what we know
as our American history in tattooing.
I think that goes back to the beginnings of it, where it was
something that happened in tribes and villages and small
places all over the world.
SCOTT HARRISON: The mark itself has this sort of
significant form, to use the [INAUDIBLE] term.
But it's just like each mark is sort of an expression.
And Thom, he does what he's inspired to do at the moment.
I'd been wanting to get my chest tattooed for a while,
and so I picked out this panther head with a
snake in its mouth.
Perfect design for a chest.
It would fit perfectly.
He initially just put it so it was, like, half covering
another tattoo.
It was like, there's plenty of space, but he chose to put
it-- he's like, see, it's not going to work.
And I'm like, oh, you could just move it.
So he washes it off.
And while I'm standing there waiting for him, he sneaks up
behind me and puts a stencil on the back of my arm.
He's like, that's where it should be.
I told you when I got my first deVita tattoo in New York, I
came and showed it to Bernie Luther.
And he was like, it's so ugly.
And I go swimming with tattooers and they're like,
oh, I've never seen anyone like a bad tattoo that much.
It's like, dude, you don't see it.
You're not stepping back out of the commercial art form and
seeing that there's this larger thing.
It's like the difference between listening to something
like Kenny G or listening to the Stooges.
You're missing the point.
My favorite wind bars.
You did the wind bars.
They're so good.
SCOTT HARRISON: You did those!
THOM DEVITA: Yeah?
SCOTT HARRISON: Yep.
Who else would have does those?
THOM DEVITA: Whenever we tattoo, we collaborate.
If you get something that Nick done on somebody, or with any
tattooer, and somebody else worked on it, on the guy's
body, it means you're collaborating.
SCOTT HARRISON: That's one thing Thom loves is when
there's an old advertising pane on the wall.
And then part of it's painted out, but you can see it
through, and there's another one on there.
And then there's another thing over there, and there's a
little graffiti-- he loves that layering effect.
CLAYTON PATTERSON: Tattoos tend to be classic--
a dragon, a tribal, an abstract, but never the whole
combination.
Now the other thing Thom does, which almost nobody else does,
is people will cover up a tattoo.
And to me, there's a richness and beauty
with really old colors.
So then he would take his new stencil, snap it down, and
then so now he's got one of his tribal tattoos totally
covering this area.
He might maybe blacken this whole part in through to here,
leave this part of the eye and head, and then maybe finish
off the tribal coming down here, leaving this part.
And so it's like a collage.
And people now, when they're going to redo a tattoo, it's a
standard way of thinking.
I don't care how creative the artist is, he looks at the
tattoo, and he thinks, OK, I'm going to cover
this whole thing up.
You get very few people who try to integrate with the old.
You've got the tribal mixed with the other elements, and
now you've got a whole different look.
And some of Carlos' tattoos, I hope there's really great
pictures of those, because that's a classy example of
that collage weave that I've never seen anybody else do up
until this point.
That's the one thing that's totally unique and amazing
about Thom, which is also the drawback factor.
Because original is not really respected that much.
Because original, especially in a conservative world, kind
of shakes the whole thing up.
NICK BUBASH: There's a book called "The Tipping Point"--
have you ever read that?
That shows you how one person or a group of people can
influence the entire world with what they're doing.
And I think that's pretty much what Thom did.
And I don't know that Thom knew he was doing it, either.
It's just what he was doing, you know what I mean?
He didn't set out saying, well, I'm going to change the
world with this.
He's not that kind of a person anyway.
He's a very humble man, and he was just
doing what he was doing.
He was making art, which he does absolutely, automatically
and completely naturally.
He's on automatic.
He never stops.
What is he, 80-years-old with Parkinson's disease now?
He's shaking, and he's still making art every day.
He'll never quit.
One time I asked him, are you doing anything different?
And he says, nah, I'm just doing the same old stuff.
He still gets excited about it, too, in kind of a low-tone
excitement.
What are you doing?
I'm working on a bunch of panda bears.
THOM DEVITA: What do you want to see?
The panda scrolls?
JOHN WYATT: Did you see the panda scroll?
MALE SPEAKER: No, I don't think so.
JOHN WYATT: That's important.
JOHN WYATT: Did you paint this is response to something?
THOM DEVITA: Yes, in response of Ed's 2,000 dragons.
I was going to do 2,000 pandas.
JOHN WYATT: Did you ever show this to him?
THOM DEVITA: Yeah, he's seen it, sure.
You should take [INAUDIBLE] down like this.