---

The Mingins Photo Collection

1288 Pictures of Early Western Tattooing from the Henk Schiffmacher Collection

by Rich Mingins, Henk Schiffmacher, and Arlette Kouwenhoven

Directly from the Amsterdam Tattoo Museum, this thick hardcover book is one of the largest and most extensive collections of early tattoo photos ever compiled. Containing just under 1300 images from the collections of English tattoo legend Rich Mingins, Mingins' scrapbooks provide an amazing overview of the world of tattoos aesthetics and attitudes during the first half of the twentieth century.

Mingins was an enigmatic man about whom very little is known. George Bone, a tattoo artist himself and one of the few surviving people with tattoos by Mingins, remembers him:

"A very quiet man, smoking all the time. He used to tattoo while seated on a little bench in the back room of his house at 59 Redfern Road, Harleston, in London, while his wife busied herself in the kitchen. There was no flash on the wall, just a book on the table and on the side of his bench he had a roll of paper towel, actually a toilet roll. It was a small room. You had to wait outside. You could not go in until someone came out.

"When he was doing his tattoos, he actually never spoke. His work spoke for itself. And that it did. Mingins' work was extremely popular in his time. His artistic work and custom designs were of high quality and really stood apart from work of other tattoo artists. I had the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that he was the type of man who would say no to an interview, so it's not surprising that so little is known about him.

Hardcover. 320 pages. Measures 9" X 13"

Sorry, this item is out of stock.

---