Purple Dragon: Small-Town Tattoo Iceberg 🧊

Part I — The Surface Layer

As a kid, there weren't allot of activities going on in downtown America in the nineties. But I can remember walking past the graffiti on this one wall. The door would open with a ding and let the buzz of a tattoo machine drift into the street, mixing with the smell of cigarettes like a pie cooling on a cartoon windowsill. That was the first time I realized tattoo shops had their own kind of mysterious gravity. They would pull you in, even if you weren’t old enough to follow the allure.

This story is the first layer of a larger iceberg theory. The surface you can see is just the beginning. If you didn’t know…..the idea behind an iceberg is that most of it hides just under the water. The surface is what everybody talks about, but the real weight of it…. the rumors, the silent truths, the cold case files live underneath. That’s where most of my knowledge rests, the underbelly.

Every small-town tattoo shop leaves a wake behind it. There are stories that float between truth and rumor… fading memories that only make sense if you were riding the wave of the times. Before tattooing got chewed up by reality TV and spit out through Instagram trends, Tattoo Shops were their own little worlds. They didn’t “represent an industry” or care about “going viral.” They carved an industry out of virgin territories.

One of those mythical brick buildings was The Purple Dragon Tattoo in Waxahachie, Texas.

Tucked into an old repurposed gas station in the area around 212 W Jefferson Street, it sat somewhere between the old historic courthouse and Oma’s Jiffy Burger. It drew in bikers, Townies, misfits, Preachers, and the occasional teenager chasing a little rebellion. The name of the shop was a deep dish with several beefy layers of meaning. Maybe it was a nod to 70s biker-fantasy artwork. Maybe it echoed old Sailor Jerry flash with serpents and dragons. Or maybe it just sounded powerful when it was echoed in a bar by some small town lot lizard to the local leather daddy.

In small towns, tattoo shops were never just tatt shops. They were rumor mills churning out hot goss. It’s no different than the inside and outside of a beauty salon, gossip leaked both ways. Every story had its own seven-layer recipe. Every town in America had that one shop that made people question the artist’s past, the town’s morals, and the stereotypes of the time. Tales spread about shop owners with dangerous secrets, cursed designs, or “infection scares.” The capital T Truth usually mattered less than the myth it left behind.

That’s what keeps me coming back to this iceberg. Over the years, I’ve sifted through what people said, what actually happened, and what became part of my own tattoo folklore.

I’m going to try to trace that elbow-web of half-truths tangled around the halls of the Purple Dragon.

This isn’t a moral audit of the owner or a fact-checking mission for the townies. It’s more like a dive into the atmosphere — the urban legends and the tones that still linger from that era of Texas & tattoo culture. I’ll move through it layer by layer: the nostalgia, the hidden rumors, and the deep, often uncomfortable stuff under it all….. like guacamole and black beans.

I’m not here to pretty up the past or make it safe for the internet. Consider this your warning. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, no hard feelings, I totally get it; so little time….so many tattoo blogs yada yada thanks for reading this far. But if you’re still here, BITCHIN. I’ve been sitting on these notes for a minute, and if I don’t put them out here right now, I probably never will.

The storie has to start somewhere with the purple dragon. Let's start here