In a tiny storefront along a gritty section of Pacific Coast Highway—near where African-American activist Ron Jackson once worked a sting operation on local cops so successfully that he caught them on videotape throwing him through a picture window—is Advanced Dermagraphics, Steve Acosta’s tattoo and body piercing shop of almost 28 years. It’s not the city’s oldest tattoo parlor, but like its owner’s point of view, it may be the most un-redeveloped. Small and spartan, Advanced Dermagraphics is all window bars, tattoo flash and equipment. No decor to speak of, no frills. Which is just how tattooing used to be in Long Beach—and the world—before the TV shows, the fourth or fifth rockabilly revival, before kustom kulture was invented and Juxtapoz magazine started: it wasn’t pretty, but it worked great. But that was then. This is now.

“The tattoo industry, it’s turning into the Vietnamese fingernail shops, and that’s not what this business used to be,” Acosta says, which isn’t a racial slur if you’ve worked in Long Beach since 1979—it’s reality. Asian-run nail salons are numerous here, tattoo parlors less so—but unlike the old days, the tattoo shops now have the airwaves; their idiosyncratic designs have won our hearts, our minds and our prime time.

“It used to be very secretive,” Acosta says. “You remember that show Kung Fu? It used to be like that—how a guy would have to go and sit in the snow for a few days and prove that he was worthy to go into the monastery. When I learned, at this guy’s shop in Denver, I was sitting on his doorstep every morning when he opened the doors, and when he closed the shop at night, he’d have to shoo me out. That went on for about six months, but it wasn’t anything so easy that all I had to do was just show up.”

This weekend, it’s just that easy—not for tattoo artists, who are flying in from across the world, but for the blank canvases who walk among us, yearning to become illustrated men and women. The fourth annual International Ink & Iron Festival—the highly successful revival of a tattoo festival at the Queen Mary, which began in the ’80s but foundered—is back on the boat with a crew of the world’s most talented inkslingers. And in a way, tattoos are somewhat the least of it—which ironically accounts for much of the new festival’s popularity.

• • •

Like so many action movies, the late filmmaker Toby Halicki’s 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds is light on plot—summary: a couple hundred cars get wrecked—but unwittingly long on Long Beach history. The film’s centerpiece—of course, a car chase—begins at Alamitos Avenue and Ocean Boulevard, with ample shots of the Villa Riviera and the International Towers. It roars through the old Pacific Park (back when Pacific Avenue dead-ended north of Ocean Boulevard in a real park), past stubby palm trees and old people on benches, past the stately old brick Carnegie Library (boarded up), the Dollar Store and either Thrifty or Woolworth’s—and two of the city’s oldest tattoo parlors, in what was left of the storied Nu-Pike Amusement Park.

The entire sequence is over in an instant, but that brief glimpse of the old city is invaluable, for it shows how much of a Navy town this still was in the years just before the fall of Saigon and the Nu-Pike. Long Beach was still home port to the Seventh Fleet and still one of a few key locales in American tattoo-dom. Better than a half-dozen tattoo shops once thrived on the Pike, and “name” artists like Bert Grimm, Lyle Tuttle, Colonel Shaw, Bob Roberts and Owen Jensen earned a good living etching eagles, clipper ships, nekkid ladies, panthers, tigers, daggers—even cartoon sailors—into the leathery hides of Navy swabbies before they shipped out.

Time was invariably of the essence. Ships were never here any longer than necessary—so when they docked, the boys would line up and the tattoo artists would work until they left. Shops bought their tattoo ink and their Vaseline (to protect the bloody new artwork) by the 50-gallon drum, and still it ran out—for this wasn’t a calling. Tattooing then wasn’t even always considered a profession; sometimes it was just something you did—a job that paid cash—and to spare your family the embarrassment, you might go so far as to change your name from, say, Edward Reardon to Bert Grimm. Tattoo flash—the designs you created—was something done in your spare time, as it is now. But the old stuff you threw away or stashed in a drawer and forgot about. Today, that same old flash sells for hundreds of dollars on eBay, as do vintage tattoo machines—working or not. And in the last decade, tattooing has gone from being a semi-underground industry of mementos—the province of the patriotic and bad-ass—to a bona fide developing art form and a hipster’s rite of passage into, now, the mainstream.

How did that happen? Three strands of pop culture are largely responsible for warming up the crowd to the likes of Ink & Iron. First, there’s the rise in the late 1960s of underground comics by guys like Robert Crumb, Stanley Mouse, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Robert Williams—paving the way for a new art market that would embrace things never before been considered art, everything from old oil cans to Japanese space monster toys to rock posters. Second, there’s the creation—with the seminal 1993 Laguna Art Museum show “Kustom Kulture”—of kustom kulture: the artistic merging of hot rodding, surfing, custom cars and pop surrealist art, which quickly expanded to include such other orphan art forms as tattoo flash and graffiti. Third is our own endless search for the next cool counterculture nook or cranny—reviving as we go everything from first-generation Mustang convertibles to obscure mid-century modern architects to Nudie Cohen western wear.

Tattooing was sure to come up sooner or later, making something like Ink & Iron—this year with 258 artists from as far off as Japan, Switzerland, Portugal and Italy—a huge hit pretty much since the start. Organizers expect anywhere from 15,000 to 25,000 people to attend the fourth edition. Why? Being in the same city as the nation’s oldest tattoo parlor—Bert Grimm’s World Famous Tattoo, now Outer Limits—doesn’t hurt business. Neither does making every year’s event a little different than the last. This time, for instance, there’s rides. You like rides, right?

“This year, we added an additional four acres—a Ferris wheel and bumper cars, to enhance the child-like play of it,” says organizer Trace Edwards, a tan, energetic man with a large Frankenstein head tattooed on his neck. His ball cap faces forward, but the bill is curled up, reminiscent of the Bowery Boys. There’s a kustom kar and hot rod show, Edwards says; there’ll be chopper motorcycles on display, bands all day—including a set by psychobillyists the Reverend Horton Heat (see related story in Music)—and on the ship, they’ll have a burlesque show in the Windsor Ballroom.

“This is a rendition of the Can-Can, with 100 percent custom costumes. And the girls are all tattooed,” Edwards says. “We actually had girls from Germany to Canada to the U.S. competing for this. Each of the top 12 girls, cars and bikes goes into our calendar. What we’re doing with that is, we’re starting to create product lines that become memorabilia of what the show has been in the past.”

Product lines, memorabilia, circus performers and—Thursday night only—a pre-show warm-up performance by the Depeche Mode cover band Blasphemous Rumors. What would Edward Reardon say? Considering that he was known to pause in mid-tattoo to tell legends of his own past—one of which was how he’d tattooed Pretty Boy Floyd—he might admire what’s been done here. Other people do.

“I think it’s great because it all goes together,” says Apple Valley tattoo artist Nikko Hurtado, who inked the Frankenstein head on Edwards’ neck, and will give it some finishing touches at the Long Beach show. “Tattooing is an art form. It’s just a different media. It takes just as much time as painting or doing other forms of art. This is a chance for people who take it seriously but don’t have a chance to appreciate it, to get that chance.” Edwards takes the argument one step further.

“They may not get tattoos, they may not have tattoos—but they appreciate the art,” he says of ticket-holders. “[Tattoo artists] are our Mozarts and Rembrandts. We don’t have any Mozarts and Rembrandts. We just don’t live in a society that recognizes art like that. These people do.”

It’s still a huge step to go from, say, Rembrandt’s moody, atmospheric, historical Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee to Hurtado’s illustrative portraits—which glow with color and shading—or to Kari Barba’s eerily lifelike renditions of butterflies at Outer Limits. Now you’re getting Biblical—a leap thousands of art lovers will never make. Because painterly though tattoos may be, to some—to many—they’ll never be paintings. Except to the thousands of tattooed people who feel just that strongly about their work.

“It’s really come to this global community that is making Long Beach its destination,” says Edwards, who stepped up publicity dramatically this year, hiring a public relations agency and spending 10 times more on TV advertising—$16,000 for this show—than he did last year. Who are these people—or, more accurately, who will they be?

“Lyle Tuttle—you’ll have to look up who Lyle Tuttle is—says bored people get tattooed,” Edwards says, name-checking the San Francisco tattoo artist and historian. “I don’t know that to be true. It gives a person the ability to design their look that they have to wear every day. And we’re in an era of mass population, where people want to stand out.” Or maybe they just want to think about standing out. Tattoo artists at Ink & Iron will be just as busy as their ancestors were at the Nu-Pike—but for every person who buys a tattoo there will be four or five watching them get inked.

“It’s probably the most crowded that I’ve seen a tattoo show,” says So Cal Tattoo artist Tom Berg, who specializes in black-and-white illustrations and has done temporary tattoos for such films as Red Dragon and the upcoming Rush Hour 3. His shop is in San Pedro, and Berg will be tattooing at Ink & Iron. “It’s like Ozzfest, people everywhere,” he says, “and it gets to be, like, a status thing. People want to hear that you were there.”

• • •

Well, some of them do—but not Steve Acosta, who isn’t planning to close his shop in central Long Beach to make an entrance downtown at Ink & Iron. For him, this is just another weekend: business as usual.

“I went to the very first convention on the Queen Mary, that was in—what? 1981, 1982, 1983? I stuck around for a few minutes and left,” Acosta says. Tattooing then was still very much a subculture of the working class: of bikers, parolees, the military and the muscled. Back then, even artists in California could smoke while they tattooed—and back pieces and armbands remained to be discovered by Newport Beach hotties and frat boys respectively.

“Suppose you move furniture for a living? Would you go somewhere and move furniture on your vacation?” Acosta asks, stepping up the line of questioning. “What’s the point? It’s putting money in someone else’s pocket who probably isn’t very good on their own to begin with.”

Which is exactly the type of judgment that Ink & Iron—and modern tattooing—still faces.

“It’s not all dolphins and wolfheads and Tazmanian Devils,” Edwards says, citing three of the most common, overexposed tattoos—which, for some, still exemplify the culture. “It’s creating your favorite image, whether it be a dolly or a Frankenstein monster. The level of artistry in tattooing has risen much higher.”

And, if his success continues, it will keep on rising.

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