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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
