Jonathan Shaw

Jonathan Dowling Shaw (born July 4, 1953) is an American tattoo artist and writer. He founded New York City's oldest tattoo shop, Fun City Tattoo, in 1976, before tattooing was legal in the city. Early life Shaw was born in 1953. His father was big band musician and bandleader Artie Shaw, and his mother was the musicians' seventh wife, actress Doris Dowling. He was raised in Los Angeles, and from his own description had a very rough upbringing. His parents' marriage dissolved when he was three years old, and he developed a heroin addiction in his teenage years, occupying his time with varied acts of juvenile delinquency. At age 19, while working at the Los Angeles Free Press, he met the author Charles Bukowski who inspired him to hitchhike from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro in 1972. He arrived in South America, finding work as a deckhand and tattoo artist. Career Fun City Tattoo Returning to the United States in 1976, Shaw relocated to the Bowery neighborhood in Manhattans' Lower East Side where he opened Fun City Tattoo, the oldest tattoo shop in New York City, where he specialized in neo-tribal tattoos and tattooed celebrities as Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, Max Cavalera (Sepultura) and Kate Moss. Tattooing, however, had been illegal in New York City in 1961, and wasn't legalized until 1997. Shaw later founded the first magazine exclusively dedicated to tattoos, International Tattoo Art in the 1980s.