Illustration by Britt Spencer
The first to officially set up shop, on Market Street in the 1920s, was Bert Grimm. Born in Springfield, Missouri, Grimm left home at age 15 with one goal: to become a master tattoo artist. In the summer, he traveled with carnivals, inking tattoos; in the winter, he haunted Chicago’s penny arcades, inking tattoos. “There’s two kinds of tattooists,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1942. “Those who can face the guy a second time and those that don’t dare, the drifters, in other words.”
Grimm had no intention of being the latter. In 1923, he undertook a Renaissance-style art apprenticeship with Sailor George Fosdick in Oregon and then noticed that the very finest tattoos came out of San Diego, where he took a second apprenticeship with Sailor Charlie Barrs. It was during this time that Grimm developed his signature take on the American Classic style—dark outlines, bright colors, subtle shading—and got so good at it, he managed to hold a near-monopoly on tattooing in St. Louis for 27 years.
In 1947, the Post reported that Grimm was considered one of the six best tattoo artists in the world and had inked “75,000 arms, legs, and torsos,” many of them attached to people who had traveled from far outside St. Louis. A carpenter from California made several trips, asking Grimm to draw his state’s native flora and fauna on his arms, legs and torso. Another repeat customer was a woman who called herself the World’s Champion Hitchhiker. Each year, she hiked from coast to coast and made a stop St. Louis for a tattoo. Most people, though, wanted “one-sitting” tattoos: a sweetheart’s name, a butterfly, a rose, or clothes drawn on a naked lady the tattooed person had come to regret. One guy showed up at Grimm’s door every time he saw a new burlesque queen perform and had her name added to a forearm. Some people asked for their Social Security number or blood type. Grimm also drew thousands of anchors, battleships, American flags, and screaming eagles on the arms and torsos of military men. Whatever the project, Grimm approached it “as an artist with a capital A.”
By the late ’50s, Grimm was back in California, where he bought out a tattoo business at 22 Chestnut in Long Beach, and eventually hung out his shingle at several other addresses. He wooed some of America’s finest tattoo artists to Los Angeles County, and the influence of that scene can still be felt today. Grimm was inducted into the Tattoo Hall of Fame in 1981, a few years before his death, and the shop on Chestnut, which opened in 1927 and now operates as Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum, is the oldest continuously operated tattoo parlor in the country.
A Tattoo Timeline
1904: Gus Wagner, “World’s Champion Hand Tattoo Artist and Tattooed Man,” stops in St. Louis to ink visitors at the World’s Fair.
1961: After Grimm splits, the mysterious Quincy Lee Cooper sets up shop as the only tattoo artist in town. He sports a crew cut, a white lab coat, and zero tattoos.
1964: Robert “Trader Bob” Cleveland opens the tattoo-centric Trader Bob’s Amusement Center, in Cooper’s old North Broadway space, near the bus station.
1974: Michael “Mitch” Mitchell takes over and re-names the business Trader Bob’s, moving it to South Jefferson, where it remains today.
1994: Brad Fink departs Trader Bob’s to help open Iron Age Studio. Fink is his generation’s analog to Bert Grimm, renowned for colorful Japanese-inspired tattoos.
