Utahns have been getting tattoos for longer than you think. Here’s where you can see proof on display.

Tattooist CJ Fishburn is leaving his mark, not just with body art on his clients but also in the history books as an amateur archivist, documenting and preserving tattooing’s past in the Beehive State.

As proprietor of Salt Lake City’s Look Look Tattoo, he has put that history on display for all to see.

Vintage tattoo designs from the 1930s and ’40s adorn the walls of his Sugar House business. Photographs of tattooists from the same era hang nearby. Along another wall sits a glass case full of tattoo machines, letters, sketches, business cards and more.

The collection comprises what has been marketed as “Salt Lake City’s only tattoo museum,” and with the shop’s impending move to the Central 9th neighborhood, the exhibit is about to get an upgrade.

For 16 years, the 42-year-old Fishburn has made wading through the history of 20th-century tattooing in Utah a part of his handiwork.

And all that sleuthing hasn’t been easy.

Digging up the past of the once-underground craft is inherently difficult, but the Beehive State’s deeply rooted religiosity — whose predominant faith once openly frowned on the practice — can bury it even further.

[Other notable past tattooists with Utah ties.]

No historian from the Utah Historical Society, for instance, felt qualified to comment on the topic, perhaps making armchair historian Fishburn the de facto expert.

“I wanted [tattooing] to be alive,” says Fishburn, reflecting on his motivation for opening the dual shop/museum in 2019. “I wanted a place where all of it was up and accessible to people.”

For native Utahn Middony Roman, a Chicana tattooist at Only Forever Tattoo, knowing the state’s tattooing past means a lot.

“We stand on the shoulders of giants,” Roman says. “It’s kind of like a family tree of tattooers. It helps branch it all together and see how far we’ve come.”

Family roots

Fishburn’s ancestors have rich ties across the state. Through his father, he descends from the founders of the 19th-century Fishburn Department Store in Brigham City, where a street still bears his family’s name.

The artistic fingerprints of his maternal great-grandfather, Alfred Lippold, can still be seen in Salt Lake City. He restored elements of various historic buildings including the Tabernacle, the Beehive House and the Utah Capitol. He also applied gold leafing on Main Street’s historic ZCMI store facade.

Despite these ties to the state, the work of Fishburn’s father — a distribution manager of the Utah-based Smith’s grocery chain — took the family between Southern California and Arizona, where Fishburn ultimately grew up.

At age 15, Fishburn built his own tattoo machine. At 17, he obtained a professionally manufactured machine and tried to apply a few tattoos before realizing “somebody has to teach me.”

He began painting tattoo designs that he admired from magazines, dreaming of becoming a tattooer himself someday.

A couple of years later, when his boss at a hotel offered him a promotion to an office job, Fishburn remembers his tattoo dreams “flashed before my eyes.”

“I’ve really got to try,” he remembers thinking. “So I quit on the spot and moved to Salt Lake to try to be a tattooer. There was more subculture in Salt Lake.”

Bringing the past to the present

Fishburn’s history buff father and English professor mother instilled a healthy curiosity for the past in him from a young age.

“When I was first back living here,” he recalls, “I would buy a cheap coffee and walk around and read all the historic plaques just to try to understand the city.”

Similarly, Fishburn gobbled up every bit of tattoo history he could find. As he advanced in his career, the collision of those two interests became all but inevitable.

Fishburn says he learned that before electricity was widespread across the country, tattooing in North America happened almost exclusively on ships. As ports on either coast grew, tattooing touched down on land, particularly in places with military ports — New York; Norfolk, Virginia; San Francisco; and Long Beach, California.

Soon, with the proliferation of electricity and the locomotive, body art traveled inland along rail routes to major cities, often accompanying circuses. That revelation combined with the knowledge of Salt Lake City’s proximity to the transcontinental railroad struck a chord with Fishburn.

“Everything I’m seeing here says that there had to be some tattooing here,” he says. “Just because there was no one to tell the next guy didn’t mean it didn’t happen. So I just got to work.”

Fishburn spoke to whoever was willing and scoured every newspaper archive he could find.

“I would meet somebody that had been tattooed by someone here in the ’60s and it was a name I hadn’t heard of,” he says. “Or I’d find an ad in a newspaper with an address.”

Through his findings, Fishburn discovered that tattooers were serving Utahns as early as 1900, much earlier than he ever would have guessed and a mere nine years after the electric tattoo machine was patented.

An ad published in The Salt Lake Tribune in 1900 proclaimed:

“Professional Electric Tattooing artist. Japanese and American designs. Open day and evening. Sunday. 70 Commercial St., Salt Lake City.”

The same ad ran again in 1909.

Fishburn believes this notice indicates either the same tattooist frequented Salt Lake City or the owner of the building — a bar and pool hall — provided a space for traveling tattooers to drum up business.

“I’ve tried to correlate travel records of circus sideshows with listings for tattooers in Utah, which is really difficult,” Fishburn says. It’s possible, he adds, that James Malcom — a well-known sideshow performer in those days known as “the Tattooed Man” and who also moonlighted as a tattooist — may have done so in Salt Lake City as the circus passed through.

Bringing artifacts ‘home’

Fishburn also discovered long-standing shops.

A.A. Traders on Ogden’s 5th Street routinely took out ads in the Standard-Examiner throughout the 1950s soliciting not only body art services but also guns.

He also discovered that Bert Grimm, one of the most famous American tattooers of the 20th century, frequented Salt Lake City and possibly had a shop in Ogden — a suspicion Fishburn hopes to soon verify.

His research understandably led to obtaining the collection of physical items he now proudly displays.

“I found articles and information about relatives and asked around. Oftentimes people still have things. They’re just kind of waiting for somebody to ask the right questions,” Fishburn explains. “I became friends with other collectors. With anything of interest to Salt Lake, most of them understood the fact that it should come home. It will be well taken care of in my collection.”

Fitting even a small museum alongside seven resident tattooists in a 1,000-square-foot space has been difficult, causing Fishburn to regularly rotate the displayed items. The new location — at 175 W. 900 South — will give him 200 more square feet to play with, affording him a dedicated room for the historical showcase. (A grand opening party is planned for Dec. 7.)

“With the new space, I hope that if there’s a space where people know tattoo history is, they can share that,” he says. “I want to talk to people now, whatever age they are, to hopefully add to the story.”

Roman agrees.

“Through CJ’s research, we can put more of the tattooers that were here before us on the map, which is very important,” Roman says. “Not for clout, but because it’s history and should be respected.”