Jonathan Shaw is a world traveling outlaw artist, novelist, notorious folk hero and apocalypse philosopher. A legendary tattoo master, trendsetter, and innovator and creator of underground art, Shaw was born in NY to big band legend Artie Shaw and movie star Doris Dowling. He was raised in LA where he learned to tattoo on the legendary Pike boardwalk from old-school California masters. After running with the likes of Jim Morrison, the Manson Family, and Charles Bukowski, Shaw fell prey to heroin addiction and a life of crime, before fleeing 1970s Hollywood to travel the world as a merchant seaman. After living and working in South America for decades, he returned to the city of his birth, where he founded Fun City Tattoo, the first street tattoo shop in NYC since tattooing was criminalized there in the 1960s. He is the author of Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes (HarperCollins, 2008), Vintage Tattoo Flash (2016, Powerhouse Books), and Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist (Turner Publishing, 2017).
Few have dipped so deeply or functioned so extensively in the cultural underbelly of our world than the notorious artist and adventurer, Jonathan Shaw. -Robert Williams Ranks with the best. -Johnyy Depp A living example of human indestructibility that is hard to surpass. -Eugene Hutz (Gogol Bordello) Bold and striking images. -Kat Von D. An American classic, a traditionalist discarding history. -JUXTAPOZ Jonathan Shaw is an acknowledged master craftsman of the present era. -SECONDS Jonathan Shaw (is) a subversive and criminal inhabitant of the world of human expression. -Jim Jarmusch ''Jonathan Shaw is a shameless evildoer.'' -Marilyn Manson ''Jonathan Shaw is the great nightmare anti-hero of the new age.'' -Iggy Pop As seen on: The GuardianGraphics LA WeeklyPonyboy MagazineMen's Journal