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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
