My first trip to New York City was in the spring of 1972, when I came at the behest of several wealthy tattoo collectors based there, my first time traveling to do custom tattoos. Within a couple of hours after arrival I met deVita at a welcoming party along with Mike Malone and several other people. I had been corresponding with Malone for some time as well as talking to him on the phone and we'd really hit it off. He told me about deVita, and how singular he was. I'd received a few 'mail outs" of deVita's work but couldn't figure out what he was doing. So Malone really introduced us. The tattoo world was very small in those days and communication and information were limited. Within the next day or so Malone took me to Thom's place, and I'd never seen anything like it.

At the time, I was tattooing in San Diego, trying to promote more unique styles of work, but every shop I'd ever seen was essentially the same format: open to the street, with a standard repertoire of flash on the walls. Tattooing was illegal at that time in all of New York City, so Thom tattooed "underground" out of his apartment. He was one of the very few, if not the only, tattooers working in Manhattan at the time. Besides being hidden away in a rundown apartment building deep in the then very forbidding Lower East Side, all the images displayed were filtered through his own completely distinctive style: weird variations on traditional tattoo themes, adaptations from a variety of sources outside the tattoo world and many completely unique things of his own invention. The biggest surprise for me was there were no cartoons. At the time, military men made up 99% of my business and cartoons, which I pretty much hated doing, made up about half of the work. I was on a great crusade to turn tattooing around into something akin to the classical Japanese tradition and realize what I felt was its true potential as a visual form. I asked deVita what he did if customers asked for "Hot Stuff" - the highly popular little devil cartoon - and he said "I tell them they'll have to get his dad" and pointed to a menacing version of a Japanese demon mask.1

This was an immediate flash of revelation for me: you don't have to give them what they ask for! DeVita had turned around the standard 'service industry' MO into a vehicle for his own vision, the first tattooer, to my knowledge, to completely break through. Everything about his place was unique, from location, to presentation of the images and through his amazing design treatment. He was the first artist I'd seen feature abstracted forms from 'tribal' cultures, expand the possibilities of design placement on the skin, create radical scenarios with the interrelationship of single images, alter scale unexpectedly - in short, transcend existing distinctions and perceptions about the art form.

I began doing a lot of work on Thom during that trip, which continued on subsequent trips by him over the years to California. In 1973 I moved to Japan and shortly after returning, encouraged by deVita's example, opened a private studio in San Francisco. He opened a mental door for me and his humor, integrity and stunning bizarre vision have been a beacon over all these years. His life and his work are inseparable. From skin, to wood and paper, to the structures he inhabits, deVita creates an inclusive continuum, his vision of the outside city or countryside he inhabits.., a parallel universe that forces us to see things in a new light. His difficult profound and enigmatic art stands alone in the world of tattooing, including it but not bound by it.

Don Ed Hardy
Oakland, CA

1By the late 90's Thom had relocated to Newburgh N.Y. where he remains. After 30 years of refusing to put on 'Hot Stuff' tattoos, deVita was finally convinced to do so by his wife Jenny. Hot Stuff in farmer jeans and hat with a tiny see in his teeth, Hot Stuff hitch hiking, hot stuff with a gun etc….. As usual, there had been people asking for these designs. Business being so slow, Jenny didn't want to see anyone walk out the door without a tattoo. Not soon after the flash went up on the wall did a customer come in and pick one of the Hot Stuffs. It was one where the little devil is giving the finger. As Thom was putting on the tattoo, he realized that Hot Stuff was looking back at him giving him the finger!