Three years later, Bert Grimm’s tattoo parlor reopens for business
By Theo Douglas

When Bert Grimm’s World Famous Tattoo reopened March 31 as a branch of the Outer Limits tattoo/piercing chain, after a three-year, $350,000 renovation, the first person to get a tattoo was a 36-year-old father of three from Whittier. Which was almost fitting, considering that tattooing has its own TV series now—Miami Ink and Tattoo Stories—and is sometimes the punch line to commercials. Its outlaw past—when Grimm’s longtime manager Rick Walters might have opened fire on a non-paying customer—is just that, and some day very soon condominiums will surround the newest/oldest Outer Limits location at 22 Chestnut Place. The area having thus been sanitized, Long Beach Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal was among the city officials on hand that morning to officially reopen the shop roughly three hours before the tattooing began.

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The first man’s name was—is—Mike Stark, and portraits of Mia, 6, Ryan, 5, and Adam, 3, decorate his torso. He hadn’t planned to be here, bleeding from his collarbones in America’s oldest surviving tattoo parlor, as tattoo artist Erika Moser sketched a background of clouds and sunbeams around his children. But in the tattoo world, you still do what you’re told.

“Up until yesterday, I was supposed to go to the Anaheim [Outer Limits], but they called and told me to come here,” Stark said, waiting calmly in a black T-shirt and jeans for Moser to finish setting up. But yeah, he said, being here on opening day did mean something to him. Bert Grimm’s is to tattooing what Detroit is to automobiles. It’s partly a fiction, but its legend and truth combine into something so strong that on opening day, people came just to see what happened to the World Famous.

The shop is all but unrecognizable to those who remember its dropped ceilings and raised linoleum floors of four or five years ago, when Walters’ plume of cigarette smoke and Vans-clad feet propped on the counter were the first things you saw and smelled. Opened in 1927 as The Professionals—when all around it was the city’s famous Nu-Pike Amusement Park, and the beach was a stroll away—the shop didn’t become notorious until the mid-’50s, when a man named Edward C. Reardon bought it.

He called himself Bert Grimm (tattoo artists then commonly took assumed names to spare their families any embarrassment) and by all accounts he was a canny businessman. To warm up the crowd, he’d pause mid-tattoo—a groggy sailor wondering what the hell—to recount his own history. In Chicago, they said he’d tattooed Pretty Boy Floyd and members of the Bonnie & Clyde gang. He might have tattooed at Buffalo Bill’s last Wild West show, but it was a good story anyway, so customers and inkslingers came in droves.

“Some of the best tattoo artists came out of this shop, and they brought others here,” says Barba, a wiry woman with spiky hair who owns three other Outer Limits in Orange County but lives in Long Beach. Men like Bob Roberts, now of Spotlight Tattoo in Los Angeles. Or Lyle Tuttle of San Francisco. Or Bob Shaw, whose family moved to Texas but kept Grimm’s for decades before selling to Barba. She sold her house to finance the facelift.

“We couldn’t keep the old and keep it clean,” Barba says. They tore up dingy linoleum laid over the water pipes and ran new plumbing and electrical above, all the while unearthing reminders in the walls—old tattoo flash, Melmac cups, vintage signs—of the men who came before. Men who might not have thought, when this was home port to the Seventh Fleet and they bought their tattoo ink by the drum, that Grimm’s would outlast every other piece of the original amusement park. (Looff’s Lite-a-Line also survives, but has left its original address for new ground on Long Beach Boulevard.)

This puts Grimm’s/Outer Limits on uneasy ground today: seismically, politically sound turf—but cultural quicksand. Tattoos have never been more popular—bringing this shop deserved recognition as one of the seminal studios of thick-lined, Asian-influenced, traditional-style tattooing. But Barba has preserved a cultural relic that is now a short drive from Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, a seafood restaurant named for characters in an Oscar-winning movie. Coldstone Creamery, which sells ice cream, is just up the street where once lived real live side shows and the Pike’s historic Double Ferris Wheel. Now with a haircut, the shop seems almost avuncular in its 80th year—but it stands alone: a bridge to itself, from past to future.

Clad in fresh paint, armed with infrared hands-free soap dispensers, the place bakes in the sunlight south of Ocean Boulevard. There’s even a digital thermostat, which reads the temperature and the new shop name: Outer Limits. But you don’t notice all that. Knowing her history, Barba set out to make this as much museum as shop. So the shop is what you see, but the museum is what you remember: greasy, dusty, one-off icons of tattooing’s past. There’s original flash by Bert Grimm—or Cecil, or whatever his name was; an original Bert Grimm’s Tattoo bowling shirt. There’s sheets of framed vintage flash by artists unknown—and a whole case of vintage tattoo machines, many of which Barba purchased with her own money.

“I hope, now that it’s open, that we’ll get some people who want to donate some stuff,” she says. “I hope people will want to let it go, and come back to where it started.”

Barba plans someday to show photographs of every artist who tattooed here; she already has more than a dozen on display. She’s rescued what could be the original cash register—and it sits in a corner atop the old safe, which they haven’t opened yet. The safe is next to a vintage 50-gallon drum full of Vaseline—what you used to smear over your tattoo when it was finished.

“It’s gooey,” Barba says regarding the drum, which is stenciled with important information in black paint. “It leaks sometimes. We have to keep wiping it up.”

Which sounds like a small price to pay for a piece of history.

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