When you say someone has Japanese style tattoos, you don’t usually mean Hello Kitty — unless you’re talking about Venice, California’s Malina Huang.

“Hello Kitty, Little Twin Stars, My Melody, Chococat, Keroppi, Monkichi and Sailor Moon,” says Huang, pointing out brightly colored cartoon creatures — pop cats, bunnies, frogs, monkeys and space girls — tattooed up and down her left arm. “They’re all characters I loved growing up.”

The Japanese cute culture characters, almost all creations of Japan’s Sanrio Company, usually turn up as children’s toys and merchandise, anime series and video games. On Huang’s arm, they appear amid the sweep of a traditional Japanese tattoo.

“We integrated them all with the wind,” Huang says. Flowing depictions of the elements are a mainstay of traditional Japanese tattoo art, a tradition many believe goes back more than 10,000 years. On Huang’s arm, it appears as fresh as ever.

“My whole body is very Japanese-influenced,” Huang says, of tattoos that cover her arms, upper chest, back, bum and the backs of her legs to her knees. “I wish i was Japanese sometimes.”

Like many young Americans, Huang — whose ethnic heritage is Chinese — has a thing for Japanese culture, for “Japan cool.” She’s just taken the love affair a little further.

Japanime stars aren’t the only cartoon characters gracing her physique, however. Huang’s upper right arm features toon terriblés from Tim Burton’s outré animated musical, The Nightmare Before Christmas. On her right forearm, a tattoo of Lenore, artist and magician Roman Dirge’s darkly comic “cute little dead girl”, cuts up with a bloody pair of scissors.

“I got into Lenore around nine years ago,” Huang, 33, explains. “She’s really cute, yet pretty mean and evil. We all have two sides, a happy side and an evil one.”

In Huang’s case, her back side is given over to the light: A tattoo of a beatific Chinese angel, wings outstretched, floats between her shoulder blades.

Begun nearly ten years ago by an artist she won’t name, the angel was initially in need of its own salvation. Around that time, Huang was introduced to Chris Brand of Good Time Charlie’s Tattooland in Anaheim, California. Brand stepped in, and his masterful redemption (read: salvage job) of Huang’s botched angel earned him a friend — and customer — for life. It also earned him a chance to expand on the angel.

“Chris had never done a full back before, and I wanted to be his first,” Huang says. Brand surrounded the angel in a sea of peacock feathers and Japanese flowers that stretch “from the top of my neck to the backs of my knees.”

Brand went on to do both Huang’s tattoo “sleeves”, as well as her upper chest, and nearly a decade later, she remains a major fan of his handiwork. Even Huang’s mother, who’s not crazy about her daughter being covered in tattoos, appreciates them. They’re hardly alone: Total strangers routinely walk up and grab Huang to examine her animed arms. (Confession: That was my first impulse.)

“It happens, like, one-out-of-ten-times,” Huang says, of strangers crossing the line upon seeing Lenore and the rest of her unorthodox ink. “Some people are just ignorant about boundaries. I don’t mind people I know touching me, but total strangers…it’s pretty annoying.”

It’s also potentially lethal, since Huang studies Krav Maga, the storied Israeli martial art. It doesn’t strike me as a bad idea, considering her plans for more of Brand’s enticing ink.

“I plan to do a full body suit,” Huang says, at which point she’ll be completely tattooed from her neck to her feet. “I just have the rest of my legs to do, for now. After I have children, I’ll finish my stomach and chest.”

Huang’s keeping her plans for the additional art to herself, though she’s not otherwise shy about her skin art. She commissioned famed SoCal pin-up photographer, Mitzi Valenzuela, of Mitzi & Company, to shoot her in her own pin-ups. (The results can be seen in the picture that accompanies this piece.) Huang has also posed for photographer Tony Franco.

While she doesn’t seem to mind the attention, Huang insists that it wasn’t her motivation for getting the tattoos: “It wasn’t to say ‘Look at me.’” Nor did she set out with a tattoo master plan. “It’s not like I thought ‘I want to do a full body suit.’”

Huang’s motivation, it seems, was as innocent as the cartoon characters cavorting on her arms.

“I just thought it would be great to have all this artwork on me,” says Huang. “It just really makes me happy.”

Photograph of Malina Huang © Mitzi Valenzuela (all rights reserved).

“It’s a made-up word,” O’Brien says, producing a copy of the macabre little paperback.

We sit together on the indoor porch of her grandfather’s home, a sun-bleached beach cottage, the likes of which are becoming scarcer and scarcer in Venice, Calif. Out the windows, beyond poisonous calla lilies and thorny branches of heirloom rose bushes, beyond a narrow walk bisecting the tranquil block, lies a field of fetching wildflowers upon which Cybele was shot (for this Gorey story).

“When i was a little girl,” O’Brien recalls, “My grandmother, Fern O’Brien, used to read me Edward Gorey books as children’s stories — which they most certainly aren’t if you’ve ever read them. But they do have cartoon-like drawings. I guess that’s how she excused herself.”

Like author and illustrator Gorey, whose popular if perverse works defied easy categorization, Fern O’Brien was both beloved and one-of-a-kind.

A tall beauty and former model, Fern and her photographer husband Ken O’Brien settled in the South Venice cottage in the early 1960’s after having lived in New York City and Paris, among the ex-pats, for much of the 1950’s.

Fern stood out among the adults of Cybele’s youth. Where so many of the “grown-ups” surrounding her were drugged or drunk hippies — think Venice in the disillusioned 1970’s — Fern was sharp. Fern wore silk. Fern could hold her liquor.

“She had style and intelligence,” O’Brien recalls. “If she had something to say, she said it. She was never apologetic. What little class I have — what little about me is interesting or evolved — I learned from her.”

In her early twenties, O’Brien had the idea of getting a version of the “mom” tattoo (”Wherein you get a big heart that says ‘Mom’ on it”), only dedicated to her granny. The catch was coming up with something granny would approve of.

“She hated tattoos,” O’Brien recalls. “She thought they were crass, and for sailors. She would never approve of a big heart with ‘Granny’ in the middle of it.”

The idea of choosing an illustration from a Gorey book came to O’Brien; her grandmother had given her The Epiplectic Bicycle as a child.

“It was kind of a rare one,” O’Brien says. “It was representative of my Granny’s sense of humor. It reminded me of her.”

O’Brien shared her thoughts with friend Paul Summers. A year later on a road trip together Summers began pressing her about getting the Gorey tattoo.

“I said, ‘I can’t get the tattoo,” O’Brien recalls, “I don’t have the book with me.”

Oddly, serendipitously, friends they were staying with in Chicago — Gorey’s home town — did. She and Summers searched it for an appropriate image.

“We came across this picture of two little kids beating each other over the head with croquet mallets,” O’Brien says. “At the time, it reminded us of (ourselves). We were on a kind of drug-and-alcohol-fueled road trip across the U.S.”

They settled on the illustration of children with mallets. The book’s owner made O’Brien a xerox.

A week later, she and Summers arrived in New Orleans.

“It was the day before my birthday,” O’Brien recalls. “We went out and got extremely drunk, met up with a couple street punk kids, and spent the better part of the night with them.”

In the morning, after crashing for a few hours in their truck, O’Brien and Summers again ran into the vagabond kids from the night before.

“I guess we were looking so rough they thought we were homeless, too,” O’Brien says. “So they took us along to the soup kitchen — I had my 22nd birthday breakfast at the New Orleans soup kitchen.”

It was a memorable meal.

“They found me a piece of cake — all these homeless guys there who didn’t have enough food to eat themselves,” Cybele recalls. “They went into their stores of stuff. There had been a cake at some other celebration that had been put in the freezer. And they cut off a chunk of it for me. It was really sweet and made me kind of cry.”

Such an auspicious start to such an auspicious day called for an auspicious follow-through.

“Paul had been poking me and poking me and poking me about getting the tattoo,” O’Brien says. Producing the scrap of paper with the drawing from her pocket, she said: “Fine, I’ll do it today.”

“We asked around, and found out who the best guy in New Orleans for fine line work was,” O’Brien recalls. “He turned out to be in the suburb of Metairie. So we drove out to Metairie and found him.”

“I think he actually had one of those contact machines that sort of makes an ink xerox of a picture.”

The artist, whose name O’Brien can no longer recall, xeroxed her xerox and transferred it onto her back.

“So, with one of the worst hangovers in my life — and still digesting soup kitchen cake — I got my version of a mom tattoo,” O’Brien says.

The effort was worth it.

“Fern made a huge pronouncement at a party that I had achieved the impossible by getting a tattoo she actually liked.”

Fern O’Brien died in September 2002. She was 85.

Occupations: Tattoo Artist & Owner, Old Glory Tattoo, Venice, CA
Preoccupations: American Traditional tattoos and Iron Man triathlons

“I got my first tattoo when I was thirteen,” says Kevin Hinton.

We sit at the bar in Hama Sushi, across the street from Venice’s Old Glory Tattoo Parlor, the shop Hinton has owned and operated since 2005. I wonder who, in America, tattoos thirteen-year-olds.

“I saw African tribesmen tattooing themselves with a sharpened bone on a National Geographic show,” Hinton says. “So I got a sewing needle and wrapped thread near the tip to control the depth and hold the ink.” Ah-ha…

“I poked myself, right here (he indicates his left wrist), wiped it clean and…it left a dot. And I about lost my fucking mind! I was, like, BING! A light went off.”

As did young Kevin Hinton: Four hours later he had four, self-inflicted tattoos and he’d given a friend another. A chain circling his left wrist was the first of those tattoos. It’s still there (and looking remarkably good, I think).

An adolescent, Santa Cruz, Calif. punk rocker, Hinton’s folks didn’t notice his tattoos, probably because, in true punk rock fashion, he already drew all over himself — his jeans, jackets, and pretty much everything else. Of course, the chains and bandannas acted as camouflage, too. (This was around 1980.)

Hinton was soon “poke”-tattooing all his friends, and anxious to improve his methods. Having heard of DIY prison tats, he found someone who’d been in the county jail. That person put him in touch with someone who’d been in state prison.

“I’m, like, fifteen and this (ex-con) is showing me how to melt a spoon, bend it over and put a Walkman motor on it,” says Hinton.

Naive but industrious, he put his new prison tattoo machine to good use.

“I tattooed everybody with it, all my friends, strangers…” Hinton says. “Early on, all I did was punk rock tattoos like Corrosion of Conformity or Raymond Pettibon art — stuff like that — Black Flag album covers, Circle Jerks — anything that was on a punk rock record, I was doing on people.”

After high school, he joined the Navy. He served from ‘86 - ‘89 aboard the USS Belleau Wood, “a landing amphibious assault ship full of marines.” And he kept tattooing everybody.

It was in the Navy that Hinton gained an appreciation for traditional American tattoos, though he didn’t yet do them.

“I couldn’t — they require a solid, clean line, and I wasn’t competent at that yet…” Hinton recalls, smirking, “unfortunately for the people I tattooed.”

Upon leaving the Navy, Hinton got a professional tattoo set-up, “an enormous, crazy-archaic Spaulding & Rogers kit that a lot of people who started tattooing in the eighties had.”

Neither tattoo equipment nor knowledge were easy to come by in those days.

“Nobody would help you. There was no Internet, no eBay,” says Hinton. “The only way to get equipment was to be sponsored by someone working in a shop, or to do a traditional apprenticeship, which meant being mistreated by some old grouchy fucker.”

Though Hinton did make headway on a post-Navy tattoo career, “habits” he’d acquired in the Navy — habits not uncommon in the tattoo industry back then — got in the way.

“I made a living tattooing,” Hinton says, “I was just a little more strung out.”

Hinton struck a “dysfunctional trade agreement” at the time with a well-known tattoo artist. (Hinton didn’t want to identify him.)

“I traded him drugs for lots of really good advice,” he recalls. “Even though I was wasted all the time, the advice stuck.”

By 1993, Hinton had cleaned up his act and was tattooing full time. Doing punk rock tattoos gave way to doing the traditional American tattoos he’d come to love in the Navy. American tattoo legends Ed Hardy and his inspiration, Sailor Jerry, were big inspirations for Hinton.

While he wasn’t that into the ubiquitous tribal tattoos of those years, he did a lot of them. “They were popular and easy,” he says.

As Hinton’s skills developed over the years, so did his appreciation for larger, more complex tattoos. Tattoos with a story: Japanese-style tattoos.

“The American Traditional stuff is one-point tattooing,” Hinton says. “You come in, get one piece. Maybe you come in, again, get another over here. One doesn’t usually tie in with another.”

Japanese-style tattoos flow.

“You can’t get them piece-by-piece because there’s over-and-unders,” Hinton says, alluding to the collage qualities of Japanese-style tattoo. “They’re all one big piece.”

And they tell stories, “like the story of the golden koi that swims up a waterfall and turns into a dragon: It’s a koi at the wrist, then, up the arm, half koi-half dragon. At the shoulder, it’s a golden dragon.” Japanese-style tattoos are mythic, filled with the gods and the elements.

“They’re just so much more involved,” Hinton says.

While Hinton loves and appreciates Japanese tats, he has none. He says they wouldn’t look right with the traditional American tattoos that are his specialty…and that cover his body.

Traditional American tattoos tell stories, but more the way stickers on luggage tell stories. Still, the old school tattoos are often rife with meaning.

“A lot of them are based around superstition,” he says, of the nautical tats he got in the Navy.

“I have the swallows,” Hinton says, referring to a pair of birds on his clavicle. “If you get the swallows, that means you’ll always return home.”

Indicating a nautical star in the center of his chest, Hinton says: “You get the nautical star so you won’t get lost at sea. Getting ‘Hold Fast’ tattooed on your knuckles means you won’t fall overboard. And having a pig and a chicken (tattooed) on the tops of your feet, means you won’t drown, because neither one can swim, so they won’t go in the water.”

Despite being pretty much covered in traditional tattoos (”all done” as he describes it), Hinton says he has room for at least one more: The Iron Man triathlon logo. He’s been competing in triathlon for three years and will soon compete in his first Iron Man (in late March).

Hinton says it’s common to get an Iron Man logo tattoo after you’re completed the event, and he hopes to have one of his own soon. (He already offers the service free to anyone who finishes.)

I don’t tell him, but I consider such a thing frank lunacy. Competing in an Iron Man competition, that is, not getting a tattoo. Though some of the tattoos Hinton’s performed over the years do seem fairly lunatic.

“One girl had me do a nautical star right on her butt-hole,” Hinton laughs (as I pick up my chin off the bar).

“I did stars and dots on a guys ball-sack, so it looked like his grandmother’s rosary bead bag,” he continues. “I’ve done flames coming out of (a girl’s crotch), and a girls crotch in someone’s armpit… Sometimes you’re like ‘What are you thinking?’”

“I just had a guy ask me to tattoo ‘Welcome aboard’ on his fucking junk,” Hinton laughs. “I told him no.”

I guess even the most hardcore, Iron Man tattoo artists — of which Kevin Hinton is surely one — have to draw the line somewhere.

Steve Christensen — whose tattoo “sleeve” features a horned-and-hooved Pan, Japanese wood-block style waves and five-petaled cherry blossoms — is into some serious esoterica.

“I’m a medium,” Christensen says, “A channel.”

We talk over beers at Venice’s venerable Hinano Cafe.

Twenty years ago, in channeling practice-sessions, Christensen connected with a most excellent spirit guide. According to Christensen, in almost every session, Greek goat-god Pan would turn up with advice for him.

“His presence was powerful,” Christensen says, “With a lot of humor…and very connected to nature.”

(I don’t know about you, but if a randy, flute-playing goat-satyr-of-a-fertility-God ever shows up with advice for me, I’m all ears.)

A decade later, Christensen was looking to get a tattoo and came across artist John Watkis’ Pan paintings at an L.A. art exhibition. He commissioned Watkis to design him a Pan-tattoo. The non-tattoo artist returned with an ambitious sketch.

A few months later, Christensen met renowned Sunset Strip tattoo artist Kevin Quinn and, taken by his work, gave him Watkis’ sketch. Quinn reworked it for tattoo-friendliness, stenciled it on Christensen’s left upper arm and, fifteen hours (spread over two months) later, cloven-hooved Pan stood there alongside a tree and its gnarley roots.

Christensen loved the tattoo but always felt it was unfinished and, two years later, asked Quinn to complete the sleeve.

“Kevin’s specialty is Japanese tattoo art,” Christensen says. “I wanted a different texture on the back of my arm — wanted it bright and having to do with the ocean.”

A devoted surfer, Christensen loves the ocean and its bounty. Quinn freehanded a Japanese-inspired design of waves and cherry blossoms on his arm…and went crazy.

“I loved his art and trusted him by then,” says Christensen. “And (the tattoo) turned out amazing: There’s Pan with this Greek mythology look — really thick lines — and then the Japanese-style waves and cherry blossoms.”

Christensen has worn the sleeve seven years.