Single Needle

It’s late on a Monday morning in Vista, California, roughly ten miles east of Oceanside in north San Diego County. Seen from outside on the sidewalk on Hanes Place, in what is the city’s nominal arts district, American Tattoo is quiet. Wedged between a hair salon and recording studio, the storefront is modest, almost unassuming. A faded, red awning hangs over a single glass window, on which the shop’s name is painted in bold and blue. 

Inside, too, it’s quiet. The shop won’t open up for another couple of hours. But it’s certainly not unassuming. Beyond a small waiting room and past a heavy curtain, the building opens up into a large work area. The concrete floor is painted a red-purple. The walls, a light shade of orange, are covered nearly floor to ceiling in framed paintings, prints, and sheets of flash all ranging in subject from roses to grim reapers to the Virgin Mary. American Tattoo is an old-school shop. It’s not a private studio for VIP clients, or an art gallery with a tattoo station tucked in the corner for the sake of take-home-forever souvenirs. 

At one of the half-dozen stations, Ben Grillo flips through stacks of drawings, sketches, stencils, and photographs—an assortment of works that he’s kept over the last fifteen or so years. “I had a girl come in once,” he says, recalling his early days in the trade, “who wanted to get some script fixed. She undid her pants to show me. It said, ‘Pink and Tasty.’ I told her that I could cover it up, since that would’ve been easier than trying to fix what was there. But she refused. When I asked her why, she said she had to keep it—it was part of her, well, career.”

Grillo smirks at the story’s end. Tattooers often have the reputation as intimidating, terse, or impatient, but Grillo’s demeanor is easy and relaxed. And he’s come a long way from talking career moves with whoever so happens to walk in off the street. Primarily known for his West Coast specific, detail-oriented, black and gray tattoos done with a single needle that, aesthetically and technically, only a handful of people on planet Earth are capable of doing, the 44-year-old is one of the most talented and respected tattooers working today. 

Still, he somehow manages to fly a little bit under the radar. And that seems to be by choice. With tattoo TV shows on major networks and tattoo artists with clientele so high profile that they themselves become something of celebrities, Grillo has steadily maintained his own path out of the spotlight. “Ben’s not the gimmick guy,” says poet and painter Coulter Jacobs, who’s known Grillo for the better part of a decade. “He’s not trying to hashtag or get sponsors. He’s been running the same, solid program for a long time. But he’s not out there advertising it. He’ll just roll up in cutoff Dickies and flip flops and do a tiny, perfect portrait of Jesus on someone’s earlobe.”

In an age where creativity, whether in art or craft, is often specialized and singular, Grillo keeps a mixed palate of interests. Besides a full schedule of tattooing and raising two kids, he’s also an accomplished photographer who’s exhibited multiple shows, a staple in the area’s classic car scene, an experienced horticulturist, and a lifelong surfer. It might seem like a lot, but Grillo maintains the most important yet ever-elusive quality when it comes to moving through even a single subculture, much less existing at the intersection of several: authenticity.

“Ben’s a student,” says Jacobs. “He grew up immersed and experienced in all that stuff, and he’s filtered it into his own practice. From the Chevys to photography to tattooing to surfing. He’s gotten a bit of influence from all these different things, and then he’s put his own spin on them. It all comes from an honest, true place. He learned from being in the right environments and being around the right people. It’s rare to have that lineage. It’s special.”

*

Grillo’s upbringing was one filled with movement and diversity. As it culminated into his identity, which in many ways is uniquely Californian, it’s ironic that it all started on the opposite coast. Born in Virginia Beach to an architect father and a volunteer firefighter mother, Grillo found art at an early age, influenced by his parents and sisters. “As a family we were always doing crafts,” he says. “My mom did everything from clay pottery to cake decorating. And my dad was always building stuff around the house, whether it was koi ponds or patios or waterfalls. My sisters would paint. I would draw—that was, like, my thing.” 

After his parents split up when he was nine, Grillo and his mom moved across the country to Huntington Beach, settling in on 10th Street just a few blocks from the ocean. There, Grillo fell into the quintessential trappings of growing up in a Southern California beach town in the 1980s and 90s: surfing, skateboarding, and punk rock. 

“I mostly hung out at Huntington Pier and Sunset when I was younger,” says Grillo. “Then Seal Beach when I got a little older. I just did what all my friends were doing. Sometimes we’d get up at five in the morning and take the bus down to Laguna. It was fun, just surfing, skimboarding, causing havoc on the strand. It was all day, every day. I failed every class in 10th grade because I missed so many classes to go to the beach.”

“Ben and I were skate and beach rats,” says childhood friend Andrew Ebert. “Orange County was a lot less plastic back then, a little more relaxed. There were genuine characters and weirdos down at the beach. We just thought those kinds of people were cool, so we hung with them. There was always some weird, shady shit going on.”

After a few years in Huntington, Grillo moved a few miles inland to the city of Stanton. There, his eyes were opened to a different set of influences, specifically certain markers of the Chicano culture prominent in Southern California that included lowriders and the style of black and gray tattoos that would one day become his calling card.  

 “His knowledge of all that comes from his life experience,” says Ebert. “The Chicano stuff comes from where we hung out in Cypress and Stanton and Crow Village. I’m this half-black guy and he’s this white kid, and we’d be skating through these neighborhoods and hanging out with the cholos. The fine-line tattoos he does now, that’s in his DNA.”

 “I had a lot of diversity in my crowd,” Grillo says. “I had friends that were strictly skaters, friends that were strictly surfers, friends that were strictly neighborhood gangsters. One weekend I’d hang out in the hood, and the next I’d hang out at the beach. It was an interesting mix. I was exposed to a lot of different things, and so I explored them.”

After high school, Grillo bounced around Orange County, then briefly moved back in with his father in Virginia Beach. Eventually, he made his way back to California and got a job as an electrician, a steady line of work that provided him a way to pay the bills. But he knew that “waking up early and spending my day with a bunch of grumpy dudes” wasn’t for him. At 28, he decided to pursue a new career path, by turning back to a combination of influences that had been there all along. 

Through all his moves and newfound interests, art remained a constant. In school Grillo would doodle in his notebooks, often scribbling waves or little figures skateboarding. As an adult, he would draw as a way to express himself.  

“He was already a great artist,” says Ebert. “We’d sit around all night and trip out and draw. He was just naturally good at detailed stuff. His specialty was with a pen. Everyone knew that was his thing.”

Grillo’s friends urged him to buy a tattoo machine for, as he suggests, their own benefit just as much as to help him figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He’d done one tattoo before, a small lizard on his own finger. He’d also been regularly getting tattooed by other people since he was 16, so he’d seen it
up close and knew a little bit about how the process worked. But in terms of doing it professionally and getting into a shop, he says, “I didn’t even know where to start.” 

Tattooing isn’t an easy business to break into. The only people with the knowledge and experience to teach someone else how to do it are other tattooers—a subset of professionals who are obviously often not so eager to give away the means and methods by which they make their living. It is a business after all, one where the supply often greatly outweighs the demand. 

Grillo ran into just that problem when he put together a portfolio of his drawings and went from shop to shop, looking for an apprenticeship. Some were polite about it. Others promptly showed him the door. Growing frustrated at the lack of opportunity, he decided to buy a tattoo kit and figure it out on his own. “I had it for a couple months and was just afraid try it,” he says. “Then one night my friend Ruben came over to my house. He said that if I wasn’t going to do it now I was never going to do it at all. So I did a Misfits skull on his calf. That opened the door right there.” 

Grillo spent the next four months tattooing out of his house, mostly on his friends. He then got a job at a shop in Westminster, where he spent the next two years tattooing smaller designs and flash off the wall on walk-ins, learning the fundamentals. “I was just slamming them out and learning how to do a bit of everything without getting in over my head. It was perfect,” he says. 

*

When it comes to tattooing, Southern California’s most defining contribution to the medium is the style known as single needle. Also referred to as fine line or black and gray, single needle is a type of highly-detailed tattoo done in black and different tones of gray wash, sometimes with a tight grouping of three needles, but most often with, as its name suggests, a single. It contrasts sharply with the boldness and brightness of traditional Americana tattoos and with the overall size of traditional Japanese tattoos. 

When it comes to single-needle tattoos, the importance of Good Time Charlie’s Tattooland can’t be overstated. Prior to the mid 1970s, single-needle style tattoos were found only in the California penal system, where inmates who had access only to single needles—commonly sharpened paper clips or guitar strings—began to develop and push its boundaries. At Tattooland in 1975, Charlie Cartwright, Jack Rudy, and Freddy Negrete began practicing single-needle style tattoos in a professional setting for the first time, spurred on by their clientele at the shop’s original location on Whittier Boulevard in East LA. 

Since it first came out of la pinta, single needle, as a style, has allowed tattooers the ability to more-completely capture the complexities and depth of realistic portraiture, religious iconography, paintings, flowing script—any image that necessitates intricate detail. In that time, it has grown into perhaps the world’s most popular style of tattooing—seen on the skin of everyone from athletes to movie stars.

While Grillo was working in Westminster, he would often get tattooed himself at the second and current Tattooland in Anaheim. Even when he wasn’t getting work done, he would sometimes pull a shift at his own shop, then afterwards head over to GTC to hangout. 

One night, he was asked to help out by tattooing a couple of walk-ins when the shop got busy, a bit of happenstance that would ultimately prove career defining. “I was nervous,” he recalls, “because it was Tattooland. But I couldn’t say no. Luckily, I pulled it off.” Shortly afterward, while getting tattooed at GTC, he was asked if he’d like to pick up some shifts on a regular basis. Starting out working two days a week, he was tattooing there full time within a month. 

For the next three and a half years, Grillo cut his teeth at one of the most legendary and influential shops in the business, learning the finer points of the craft and getting intimately acquainted with single-needle style tattoos under the guidance of Jack Rudy, one of the men who pioneered the style and who by then was GTC’s owner. “I think Ben really had an interest in black and gray work when he started working for me,” Rudy says. “Anyone that comes around our shop is going to do that. But it seemed like the longer Ben was there, the more he really got into single-needle black and gray. So it was the perfect place for him to hone and grow his skills.”

“Going from not tattooing at all to working at Tattooland two years later was pretty amazing,” says Grillo. “I went from doing street shop tattoos from off the wall to GTC single needle stuff. That’s where I learned everything. It was the most important part of my tattoo career, or even just my art career. It opened so many doors and gave me the gold member pass to do anything. The wealth of knowledge I got just learning from all of those guys—my art wouldn’t be what it is if I didn’t work there.”

As Grillo grew as a tattooer and artist at Tattooland, he began to develop a specific style of his own, based in his various lifelong interests. While any tattooer’s body of work is heavily dependent upon whatever the person in their chair happens to want at any given time, the great ones are able to put their own stamp on and signature into each and every tattoo they do, their work immediately identifiable as theirs at first look and possessing what Rudy refers to as “soul.”

For Grillo, this meant a focus on perfecting and pushing the limits of the types of single-needle tattoos that originally came out of the Chicano neighborhoods and Tattooland. “Aesthetically,” he says, “I really like tattoos to have that classic element of illustration to them. I want my tattoos to look like my drawings, to look like tattoos. I don’t really like doing portraits as most people do them, because in a way it’s just copying an image. For me, it doesn’t feel like I’m being creative. I like having the artistic freedom to draw or shade how I want. I’m trying to get my stuff to look like the early single-needle tattoo-style stuff that Jack does. So, for instance, if I’m doing a chola girl, I like to add lots of hair to get that old-school effect. That’s what makes a tattoo like that what it is.”

“He evolved quickly,” says Rudy. “His attention to detail is almost unmatched. He does a lot of stuff all single needle which is time consuming and rare. People who don’t look at shit carefully, it will go right over their heads. But anyone that does take the time to look at it carefully knows the skill that’s involved in that kind of work. He’s serious, and his work shows that. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter of the tattoo is. Everything he does is like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do.”

Aspects of Grillo’s background are clearly visible in his work. Surfing and beach culture often make their way into Grillo’s tattoos, sometimes directly, like a literal depiction of a surfing bird, or subtly, like a skull with an eye socket composed out of a breaking wave. So too do classic Chicano-style motifs, whether it’s chola girls, classic cars, or fanned-out peacocks. It all comes back to a focus on his lineage.

“He’s from Huntington and he’s from Stanton,” says Jacobs. “If you’re from Southern California, there’s a cross pollination between the lowrider stuff and the surf stuff. And Ben soaked all that different stuff in, and used it to create his own style. But he’s a real artist and no matter what he does, he makes sure that you can see the references.”

And while Grillo is just as capable of tattooing whatever his clients ask for (the exception is Japanese tattoos, which comes with its own customs and traditions that can take a lifetime to learn, a subculture within a subculture), it’s his single-needle tattoos that continue to impress the toughest crowd. “There’s still something about a single when it’s in the right hands,” says Rudy. “There are very few people out there who have all the requisites to do it the way it’s supposed to be done. And Ben’s one of them.”

*

Back in Vista, American Tattoo is starting to wake up. “Tennessee Stud” by Johnny Cash bleeds through the speakers. Other tattooers begin to arrive and mull around inside and outside, waiting for appointments, and walk-ins come through the door with questions. 

Grillo steps into the alley and into the sunlight. Just a short drive across Interstate 78, and it’s 15 degrees hotter here than on the coast. The sun is high and the heat is suffocating. After a lifetime of moves, changes of directions, and starts and stops, Grillo has decided to settle down for the foreseeable future. 

“As far as living,” he says, “Oceanside is it. We just bought a house, so we’re staying. I want to stay at this shop for a while. I like working here. I’ll do some traveling. That’s the good thing about tattooing. You can bounce around and guest spot and do conventions and get out of town if you need to. We’ve got the beach, the weather is great. The people here are cool. It’s less of a scene than OC or LA. It’s not a big competition down here. Down here nobody gives a fuck.”

Pressed about his other interests and where he might want to take them, Grillo explains that there isn’t anything more to them than doing for doing’s sake. “All those other things are therapeutic,” Grillo says. “Tattooing and drawing, they’re my livelihood and, in a way, I do them for other people. There’s pressure to do a good job. But I can get excited about the way a photo turns out, or mess around with a car or my plants, and it’s just for me. It’s relaxing. Surfing has that type of freedom. It’s for my own satisfaction and enjoyment, just a different way I can express myself.”

“He’s one of those people,” says Jacobs, “where if he gets into something, he’s all in. Ben has this mellow persona but he’s calculated, well-thought-out, and heavily researched. So he gets into tattoos, learns the history and the mechanics, and suddenly it’s incredible work. A while ago he got into plants and the next time I went into his backyard, he had a jungle back there. It’s the same with photography and cars and surfing. He has a lifelong commitment to the things he does. Everything comes across as effortless, but it’s not without putting in the work.”

When it comes to what he’s picked up along the way, the list is long with licks and lessons. Grillo hopes to maintain the values he’s learned—tenets that his art and profession are rooted in—in an industry that’s growing more and more mainstream. 

 “It’s harder to be an outlaw and just do your thing,” he says, “but that’s definitely real tattooing to me. Everybody is worried about getting Yelped. I feel like there’s this weird entitlement thing people have now, that they know best. But if someone comes in with an attitude, I’ll totally kick them out of the shop.”

Grillo’s first appointments of the day walk down the alleyway—two girls in their early twenties, diamonds in their teeth, tattoos running down their arms and onto their hands and fingers. One is a regular, adding on to existing work. For the other girl, however, it’s her first time getting tattooed by Grillo and he asks her what she wants to get. 

“A portrait of my grandmother,” she says, and pulls out a few photographs for reference.

Grillo then asks her several questions about how she’d like it done: size and placement, shading and style. A portrait of a relative is, almost always, a highly personal and meaningful image to get tattooed, not necessarily the type of work that typically warrants creative license, so he asks for a few more details. 

“You can just do it how you do it,” she says. “I trust you.”

Grillo at his home shop, American Tattoo Parlor, in various stages of the process. While specific aesthetics and styles change with the times, much of the technical application of tattooing—from drawing patterns to making stencils to machine setup—has remained the same for well over a hundred years. 

Grillo’s work includes Charra girls, reapers, sacred hearts, and waves. While each client calls the shots, Grillo’s talent frees him to blend his background, influences, and interests, culminating in a look that is unmistakably his.

[Feature image courtesy of Ben Grillo]