Tahiti Felix 2000+ Acetates Contact Sheet!

Tahiti Felix Master Tattoo Acetate Archive

SPECIAL PRICE FOR THE FIRST 50 DOWNLOADS!

ONE DESIGN TATTOOED PAYS FOR THE ENTIRE COLLECTION!

Over 2,000 Original Tattoo Acetates from San Diego, California

This is a piece of tattoo history from Tahiti Felix, Maurice and Hiro Lynch, Lefty Al Miller, Painless Nell Bowen, Ralph Johnston to name a few! Specially priced for the first 50 customers!

For decades, the walls of Tahiti Felix Master Tattoo in San Diego were covered with acetates used by generations of tattooers. Eagles, pinups, military designs, sailors, girls, animals, cartoons, religious pieces, oddball stuff and plenty of designs you simply don’t see hanging in tattoo shops anymore!

Tahiti Felix’s Master Tattoo has been tattooing San Diego and the world since 1949, and these acetates are part of that story.

In the early 2000s, the entire surviving collection was digitally scanned for preservation. The scans sat archived for nearly twenty years before I finally took on the job of sorting, identifying and cataloging them one by one. The result is a massive contact sheet containing more than 2,000 individual acetates, organized so you can actually browse the collection instead of digging through a pile of old sheets.

These are not modern flash designs made to look old. This is material that came directly from the working walls and files of an old-school American tattoo shop.

The scans naturally show their age. You’ll see pencil marks, registration numbers, stains, wear, fading, crooked edges and all the other scars picked up through years of actual shop use. That’s part of what makes them special.

And this isn’t meant to be a polished, ready-to-print flash book.

It’s a working reference archive.

Any tattooer worth their salt should be able to look through these sheets, find a forgotten idea, redraw it, clean it up, change it around and make something great out of it. That’s exactly how tattooing has always worked. Designs passed from hand to hand, shop to shop and generation to generation, with every tattooer leaving a little of themselves in the drawing.

There are enough ideas in this collection to keep a tattooer busy for years.

More importantly, making this archive available helps keep these designs from simply disappearing. Tattooing has a rich history, but much of it lived on pieces of acetate, tracing paper and flash hanging on shop walls. Once those things are gone, they’re gone.

This collection is my attempt to make sure at least this part survives.

Over 2,000 pieces of old tattoo shop history, preserved, cataloged and ready for the next generation of tattooers to put to work.

Keep drawing.
Keep tattooing.
Keep the old school alive.
Don’t anger the Tattoo Gods and support!

- Tahiti Gil
Since 1991