Jews, cavemen, Nazis and burned sticks
How Jewish tattoo artist Eric Perfect sees the world
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I had met tattoo artists before. I’d met Jews before. I’d even met Jewish tattoo artists before. But I had never talked to a Jewish tattoo artist about where they saw the lines of their cultural identity diverge and converge, before I spoke with a man named Eric Perfect.
I found Eric in a sort of oblique way while I was at a tattoo convention, waiting, with help from the Tattoo Flash Collective.1
The Tattoo Flash Collective is an interesting concept. “Flash” are the predesigned tattoos found in a binder at the front of a tattoo shop, the creation of which is largely credited to another Jewish tattoo artist, Lew Alberts, known as Lew “the Jew.”
The collective gathers a wide variety of sheets of flash by artists, catalogs them all by name, location, style, iconography and more, and then sells the flash at conventions, giving the artists a cut of every sale. I asked if they had any Jewish stars in the database. They found me Eric Perfect.
Perfect said he grew up “on the only non-Jewish block in northeast Philly.”
“I wasn't bar Mitzvahed, but my grandparents were Jewish,” he said. “My grandfather, he fled Eastern Europe during the war and met up with his parents in England with his two brothers. They got chased by Nazi soldiers that were shooting at them. They jumped on a garbage scow and the scow took them across this river and then they made their way to England, where they met up with the rest of their family.”
Tattooing has long been seen as a hobby or lifestyle for rough kinds of people, bikers and fighters and sailors and carnies. Perfect describes his grandfather that way: “He used to get in fights with some of the gang guys in London, back in the day, used to brawl with those guys.”
“They had to hide their Jewishness,” he said of his grandparents, once they got to Philadelphia. “You had to hide being Jewish or you got fucking killed. People think Philly is like this city, but I mean, it's pretty fucking hillbilly, when it comes to racism and anti-semitism and shit here.”
Perfect’s first introduction to tattoos was older kids in the neighborhood, who would hang out on the corner. “All those guys had a tattoo or had a couple tattoos and shit and whenever they got one, they would show it off. I thought that was fucking cool shit. And then my brother went down and got one of his big lion head with his name, Leo. And I thought that was cool.”
Perfect almost got a tribute to the band Iron Maiden while serving in the Army a few years later, but chickened out. After the service, he tried art school with the idea of becoming a professional comic book artist. “I made my way back because I had just gotten married. That's a whole big mish mash, you know what I mean? I thought I could do everything and it just didn't work out that way.”
His first tattoo was a skull spider about a year later. He said he “almost fucking passed out.”
Perfect still had dreams of being a comic book artist and so ran a comic book shop. “That was around 1990. I started tattooing in the back in there and once the landlord found that I was tattooing in the back, they tossed us out of there. I found a little tiny building down the street for about 300 bucks a month. So I hopped in there and started tattooing.”
He got some help from a friend, Sonny. It’s a story that is not uncommon in the history of tattooing. A younger, aspiring tattoo artist takes the opportunity to learn from someone with the knowledge they wanted. “He was kind of fucked up at the time. I was all clean and sober. So I figured I could help him out,” Perfect said.
Sonny got a place to sleep, and Perfect got a mentor. “He was really well versed in traditional tattooing, in the history of tattooing and immediately started rubbing off on me.”
When I asked Perfect what his family thought of his tattooing, he immediately burst into an imitation of his grandmother, adopting the voice of an old woman, but with a little gravel in it, and a much thicker accent than Perfect’s own. “My grandmother was always hanging out, ‘Kid you don't need any more tattoos. What do you need tattoos for?’”
]Perfect didn’t grow up religious, but he feels Jewish, knows he’s Jewish. He’s already bought a plot in the local Jewish cemetery.
“The Jewish cemetery has no problem taking my money for our plot where we’re going to be laid to rest,” he said. “You're paying your money every month and then you got your plot when you drop dead. I think we're gonna be in King David cemetery up there in like Ben Salem somewhere.”
He’s tattooed more than a few Jewish stars over the years, along with crosses and spiders and skulls and everything else. But Perfect doesn’t think much about tattoos and identity.
“People think people are gonna wear this forever. And it's like, motherfucker, you're gonna wear that ‘till about two weeks after you're dead. No one's gonna even fucking remember,” he said “I mean, nobody needs a fucking tattoo. You know what I mean? It's not something you need to live. If no one ever got fucking tattooed again, it wouldn't wanna make a goddamn difference.”
So, why do people get tattoos?
“I want to say the first caveman tripped and fell on a fucking burned stick and there was a mark in his skin and then the female fucking caveman was like, ‘Oh, you look pretty sexy,’ and started rubbing up against ‘em so then they all started getting fucking little pokes on them. You know what I mean? It’s probably just a way to get laid.”
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This happens a lot. When your significant other decides to get a large tattoo at a tattoo convention and you only have one mode of transportation, you wait, wandering around from stall to stall, aisle to aisle, until every tattoo and cultural taboo blurs together. If you wait long enough, you’ll soon exhaust the interests the convention itself has to offer and you’ll happen across a place quieter than everywhere else. There you will find other halves of relationships who are also waiting. They are usually found isolated, in a single, quiet, somewhat bored group. Here’s a photo I took with us.)
