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

Part Two: The Epidermis

The Name- The Purple Dragon

Disclaimer: I use a lot of colorful language and some derogatory terms. That’s okay, because I like the way I talk, and I like you too. Try to be chill.

Before we can break the skin on this bad boy, we’re going to have to scratch the surface around the sensitive tip of this iceberg.

So, like any story, it starts with a title. Or more precisely, what it meant, what it stood for, and what it would come to mean.

I’ve heard the old Purple Dragon story about a hundred or so times from the yellowed, tobacco-stained lips of every salty, old-school tattooer who took pride in his roots and valued the art of storytelling in a way that’s been lost to fast-paced media.

I’m pretty sure most of you (especially if you’re here) have heard it by now.

Maybe you can recall, though, that there was a time when you had to buddy up to a guy for a few years (even trade goods or jobs) before a guy felt like opening up about this old story he’d heard, memorized, and embellished.

But for the sake of continuity, I’ll lay it out as history denotes.... not from research or verifiable sources, but from the same way I first heard it:

consumed, then regurgitated, and finally chewed like cud in the back of my mind until it comes to pass that it fertilizes the thoughts of future degenerates.

---

Soooooo…

Sometime in the 60s, in Honolulu’s Chinatown, Sailor Jerry (Norm Collins) had already decided he despised the idea of people sharing tattoo information with the uninitiated.

Through a local interview, Jerry overheard another tatter by the name of Lou Norman mentioning that purple ink didn’t exist.

As you probably know (though something not universally understood by clients of the time) the pigment used to make purple ink was toxic.

In a pretty gnarly way, too.

So Jerry, being Jerry, took that as a personal challenge to make someone publicly look incompetent.

The man was an innovator in a way that has affected every following tattoo generation.

He mixed his own pigment, tattooed a bold purple dragon on some guinea pig’s arm, and then sent the kid straight down the street into his rival’s lair to ask for a “huge purple dragon tattoo, with no budget.”

Lou apparently really chastised the kid in front of a lobby full of sailors.

When Lou called bullshit and said, “There’s no such thing as purple ink,” the sailor rolled up his sleeve; and there it was, as purple and swollen as the devil’s dick.

The guy tells ol’ Lou that Jerry had no problem doing one already, and Lou allegedly dropped from the shock.

My guess is, he probably thought this dipshit had signed his own death warrant.

I’d imagine Lou thought this guy was ruining his arm with a carcinogenic substance that would rot him alive.

Jerry was never one to waste a punchline, especially at the expense of an adversary.

So, allegedly, he sent Lou a bouquet of purple orchids with no note.

But that’s just an old story... and my hometown couldn’t be farther from Honolulu.

---

I like to think that old fable is the origin of the shop’s name from my quiet & secluded neck of the woods.

But to be honest, I’ve never actually interviewed the owner aaand that’s not really where my interests lie.

The truth is... once upon a time, people weren’t dying to share esoteric knowledge, legends, or secrets.

Unfortunately, that kind of secrecy creates a sub-culture of outsiders looking in, making assumptions about things they can’t perceive or don’t understand.

It’s human nature to fill in the gaps.

You see a shadow and imagine you saw a person.

A face appears in abstract wood grain.

Maybe you see shapes in a cloud as it passes.

Our minds do the same thing with missing information, they can't help but fill in the gaps.

Like most kids growing up in rural Texas at the turn of the millennium, I didn’t know who Sailor Jerry was/ or anything about this story.

What I did know was that the shop in my town had a weird, mysterious name & it was a random-seeming title that everyone seemed to know.

Even weirder, everyone knew someone who had gone there, and each of them had their own version of the story behind the name.

That air of mystique will always lead to a need to “be in the know.”

As one would expect, this will create a powder keg of misinformation.

I often wonder if the absence of a shared narrative creates a vacuum of information that is inevitably filled with rumors until it is as sufficient as fact.

You have to be seeing examples of this every day by now.

The current fast-moving news cycle drops a headline, and the first story to print becomes solidified into the zeitgeist — regardless of truth.

---

One of the strangest parallels to that misinformation phenomenon was a leftover idea from the era that honestly doesn’t make much sense at face value:

purple = gay.

It sounds silly to a person with a fully formed adult brain, but in the late nineties, underground gay culture was still a rumble under the floorboards of middle-American homes.

Mirroring the satanic panic before it, it sparked fear and fascination in the misinformed.

Years before a strange televangelist claimed he’d received a vision that the purple Teletubby was gay, kids in schools were already whispering about coded symbols gay people used (what ear you pierced, what side you wore a wallet on, if you sucked dudes)… who could keep track of all the rules.

But the main thing that caught on in Waxahachie was purple.

One of the worst fights I saw at the time was in elementary school.

It started because a kid called another kid a “purple shirt.”

The fucked-up thing is, his mom had just put him in a purple polo.

But in that moment, “purple shirt” was a low-brow stand-in for “gay.”

Honestly, looking back, the whole thing seems pretty gay.

Yet in that climate (with the AIDS epidemic still misunderstood and misrepresented on every news outlet) being called gay was a serious slur.

Regardless of how you perceived that statement… it is what it is.

---

Through my early teen years, everyone just knew that The Purple Dragon had to be tied to gay culture.

And of course, all those self-proclaimed experts also just knew that all gay people probably had AIDS.

Then, sometime around middle school, a local “free-thinking genius” connected the dots between esoteric symbolism and a grainy photo making the rounds on the early internet.

Boom! 💥 “The Purple Dragon” must be a euphemism for a man’s penis.

In fact, they said, the guy who owned the shop probably had a big purple dragon tattooed on his cock.

Pretty soon, everyone just KNEW that was true.

Over the years, that rumor was no longer spinning... it was gaining traction.

As gay counterculture became more visible in the mainstream, people who thought they were being progressive started parroting baseless stories if it made them sound compassionate or “open-minded.”

---

To this day, I still get messages from people asking if the owner really had AIDS, or if the shop was some kind of underground gay bar.

After I posted about it on my story yesterday, someone messaged me saying:

> “I can remember when I was a teenager, they always said the owner of Purple Dragon had AIDS, and if you got tattooed there, you’d get AIDS too.”

That message was pretty much copy-and-paste identical to dozens of others I’ve received since talking about this topic.

In all honesty, though, the truth that lies deeper is much crazier.

It’s a microcosm of public scrutiny and mob culture that has been applied on a macro scale to the rest of the world through the internet.

I never got to go inside the Purple Dragon Tattoo before it closed its doors.

But from where I sit, these rumors and stories probably killed the shop.

Sure, it kept its loyal regulars, but their ability to reach new clients was strangled by word-of-mouth and reputation.

Fear and regurgitation p

erched over the old building like a vulture’s nest.

Once we break through the surface, maybe you’ll see this iceberg a little deeper.

Part 3: Subdermal Anchors

Disclaimer #2

In the spirit of transparency, I want you (the readers) to know that after posting the last blog, I started to feel some type of way. Soooo … in an effort to seek out every version of the truth, I reached out to the owner of The Purple Dragon to ask a few questions and maybe clarify a couple of the finer details.

He replied and said he’d be happy to answer my questions. However, while I wait on his reply, I’m realizing that no matter what he says, it will inevitably change how I see this story as I write it. That realization gives me a sense of urgency to bring you the next part before any of my views or opinions shift—and I believe they will, just by the mere fact of knowing more than I did yesterday.

Part 3 isn’t what I’d call finished, but I’m happy to share it in its current state.

.__.

It’s 1978, and you’re sunbathing on a beach in Goa, India, along what was known as the hippie trail. It’s the height of the most free-thinking, live-and-let-live era in modern memory. Suddenly, you spot an eleven-year-old boy with the biggest tattoo you’ve ever seen, handing out flyers for his family’s business.

“What in the world?” you think to yourself.

Even in that time of love and peace, seeing that had to shake some people’s reality to the core. And I’m sure none of them imagined that a skinny kid from their tales abroad would grow up to become one of the most renowned tattoo artists of my lifetime..... and someone who personally inspired me to be more than just a tattoo man.

Filip Leu ( a few years before his ascent into tattoo legacy) was simply a child born into a bohemian family living on the outskirts of modern society. A boy who received his first tattoo from his father around age eleven and, by some accounts, performed his first tattoo by thirteen.

.---.

Throughout most of pre-modern history, families like the Leus were the cultural norm. Believe it or not, for thousands of years the archetype of a family was simple: a father who specialized in a trade that served his community. He would hone that craft to support his family and protect his bloodline.

Ideally, a mother helped where she could and kept the children at bay until they were old enough to learn their father’s trade. That system offered a double-edged sword: free labor, sure … but also a way to pass down ancient knowledge, principles, and belief through long hours spent side by side. The hope was always to hand that lineage off to the next generation.

Through the lens of modernity, we call that patriarchy/ or outdated. In today’s world, it’s easy for someone to claim outrage, or to wedge themselves between a parent and child over a perceived harm.

---

So now we hear stories like, “Oh, I got tattooed at that place in the ’80s when I was a teenager.” Someone mentions an old shop and another chimes in, “Yeah, I got tattooed there when I was a minor; they didn’t give a fuck.”

But what slips from memory is the reality of fluctuating ideals. The truth is, there was no standard, no regulation, no oversight for tattooing in Texas until 1993. I don’t know if there was one single incident that made the government decide to shove its nose into the business … but once that genie’s out of the bottle, it doesn’t go back in.

Generations of Texas tattoo families who had long taught their kids to tattoo resisted the new invasive oversight. Suddenly, people who’d been trying to peek their noses into the business of tattooing were all the way in. These outsiders (once not privy to its secrets) were now the ones demanding access and oversight. Inspectors were just strangers with badges that were walking into sacred spaces they’d never earned the right to enter. What had once been a closed circle for the initiated was now an open book, being re-written whilst read for the first time.

---

But nestled beside the Skeltons’ motorcycle run *which I believe was owned by Bill and Carol Skelton** and tucked away from the crowded urban grind, this wave of modern tattooing was moving forward. Into the chapters of this open book.

There used to be a time when walking into a tattoo shop wasn’t for everybody. The prudish, the weak-willed, the indecisive — those people stayed out. The tattooed eleven-year-old handed your hippie aunt a flyer, and she tosses it away in disgust. The mystique itself was enough to keep them from crossing the threshold into what promised to be the most permanent investment of their short lives.

Then came the decades of 24-hour media, dragging everything out of the ether. After punk rock exploded, it established a broad counterculture that bled into art scenes everywhere. Suddenly the sight of a tattoo on MTV wasn’t foreign anymore. The forbidden fruit had been televised, and as always, that made it even sweeter.

The doors opened wider, and new business is always welcome when you’re young and hungry. But with those new customers came their reservations and their preconceived notions about this “bad” thing they were doing … and about the kind of place where they were doing it.

People look back on those shops now and judge them through the frosted-glass, IKEA-and-fern-riddled lens of the modern med-spa-style tattoo parlor. They lie in sterile rooms getting AI-generated designs from some quiet kid with an art degree, and it becomes easier to judge their own past.... And in turn forgetting how much soul, noise, and human mess once came with the craft.

We minimize our part in our era of rebellion. How quickly we forget getting fake IDs, begging an aunt to play mom... just to get tattooed or pierced when we knew we weren’t old enough. Old enough to know better, too young to care as they say.

Now you look around the quiet, white-walled studio, the hum of the machine replaced by silence, and it’s easy to forget why tattoos ever felt dangerous. Easier still to judge the cluttered, chaotic shops of the past instead of honoring them as part of the culture’s DNA.

---

Imagine for a moment you’re that young, adventurous kid, sitting for your first tattoo. You’re nervous, adrenaline buzzing through your veins.... and suddenly in the middle of it, the smell of green soap mixes with cheap aftershave and palpable discomfort. In walks the newly formed arm of the health department to inspect the shop. They mention a couple of minor violations, but it all sounds like Greek to you.

Later, you’re drinking with a buddy, telling the story of how the place you got tattooed got “raided,” and suddenly that snowball of rumor is rolling downhill.

It wasn’t uncommon then (or now) for competition {especially among so few shops} to breed wild talk. One artist, a town or two over, might say, “Don’t go there, man, I heard he uses dirty needles.”

This was a leftover habit from the old scab merchants who used to set up roadside tents. Lesser craftsmen would tattoo wherever they could get away with it, staying just far enough from the next guy a town over to avoid a fight. They’d hoard whatever new business they could and tarnish anyone else’s name in the process.

---

The Purple Dragon didn’t have much competition in Waxahachie ~ or in the area at all, for that matter. So who would benefit from its demise?

I should probably disclose this: growing up in this town, I know plenty of people who knew the owner and plenty more who got tattooed there. And I’m 95 percent sure all the rumors surrounding the name were just that .... local urban legend.

Still, you’d hear stories: “I got tattooed there when I was sixteen.” “I got my belly button pierced there.” But those stories leave out details.major details like how someone’s dad was a childhood friend of the owner and gave his blessing, or how they had been pestering mom all summer to feel like part of the same rebellious current as everyone they admired. I still get parents TO THIS DAY who can’t comprehend that, legally, they aren’t allowed to give consent for me to tattoo their child in the state of Texas.

The half-truths feed the more elaborate rumors. And before you know it, bias and speculation shape how you remember everything... all because you NEED to know.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be part of everything. You don’t have to fit into everything. You don’t have to know everything.

And if you absolutely must chase down the story behind that eleven-year-old boy walkin up to you on a beach in India, maybe stop and ask yourself: were you ever meant to find something more, or were you the intended mark the whole time. Are you driving the narrative, or are you a dark tourist, a passenger to the informed?

Because sometimes, in the hunt to belong, the toll you pay for inclusion is the price of loosing the mystery itself.

As we wash tattooing clean with the disinfectant of sunlight, we lose the dark underbelly that created it. And t

hen who will be the next Leu family? There are great costs to creating greatness.