Grimm Tattoo and the birth of the American traditional style

Tattooing gets in the blood. Literally. When a tattoo needle pierces human skin, the soluble chemical carriers physically enter the punctured dermal capillaries. 

Tattooing gets in the blood metaphorically, too. Especially for a man like Wes Grimm, inheritor of a fabled legacy in the history of American skin art. Tattoos are in his blood, his mind, heart and soul.

Wes is the great-grandson of Bert Grimm, a legendary American tattoo artist who helped develop and popularize the American traditional style. Wes has dedicated his life to preserving and expanding that family legacy. 

We met Wes on a blistering day at his namesake storefront shop (1613 Genessee St., KCMO) in a revitalized stretch of Kansas City’s West Bottoms. Wearing a pale, long-sleeve Western shirt, a silver bolo tie and black cowboy hat, Wes relayed his family’s story and their role in the development of skin art. 

It’s a picaresque tale, rich with legend and quirky bits of Americana. Bert, for instance, once wrestled a bear. He’s also said to have tattooed outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde and famed gangster “Pretty Boy” Floyd, among others.

Those sorts of anecdotes, though, are just the window dressing. The heart of Bert’s remarkable story is the rise of a distinctly American artform.

“We’ve been carrying on a family legacy since 1916,” Wes says. “Grimm Tattoo opened in 1916, and there’s been a continuous Grimm tattoo in a line from my great-grandfather to grandfather to me. So I think it’s pretty safe to say we’re the oldest in the country.”

In addition to being an active tattoo parlor, the place is a museum. Its long, narrow space is covered with framed newspaper stories, historic photographs, old tattooing equipment and, most of all, flash art. 

The flash is key. One cannot understand the history of tattooing without understanding flash sheets. Pre-drawn collections of tattoo designs displayed on a page or poster, hung on walls or bound in books, flash sheets act as a sort of visual menu, offering ready-made art that clients can choose from. 

At Grimm, the flash sheets are legion and ancient, some nearly a century old. They are lovingly displayed and treated with the same sort of reverence that a scholar of the Impressionists might have for the works of Pissarro or Monet.  

The collection documents the family’s experience in Chicago, St. Louis, Long Beach, Calif., and finally Kansas City. And all of it stems from a pre-teen runaway. 

That would be, of course, Bert. Born in Springfield, Missouri, in 1900 as one of a dozen children, Bert ran away to join the circus at the tender age of 12. And that was just the start. By 14, young Bert was covered in ink from neck to ankles—a walking canvas before “canvas” was even a term of the trade. That led to a new gig. Bert became the Tattooed Boy of Borneo, a sideshow attraction, replete with a colorful backstory about being kidnapped as an infant and ritually inked by an indigenous tribe. It was pure showmanship—unabashed American hucksterism. And it worked.

At 16, Bert took another step into legend. Armed with raw confidence and a rogue’s education, he opened his very first tattoo parlor in Chicago. That was 1916. Not long after the door opened, another master of American mythmaking walked through: Buffalo Bill himself. It was just a year before the American soldier and showman’s death, and he hired the young tattoo artist to work in a Wild West show. 

Bert bounced between circuses and Wild West spectacles until 1926, when he established the very first permanent tattoo shop in St. Louis. 

“He was there for 30 years, then moved to Long Beach, California,” Wes says.

Out West, Bert thrived. He eventually came to own six shops at the Pike, a sort of West Coast version of Coney Island, and played a huge role in developing what would come to be called the American traditional style.

That style, distinct and instantly recognizable, was rooted in the working classes: the mill workers and machinists, roustabouts and renegades. Heavy on primary colors, American traditional is famous for bold, black outlines, flat fields with relatively limited shading and an unapologetically cartoonish visual lexicon—including lots of military insignia and nautical motifs, along with skulls, dice, cards, hearts, daggers and tons of pop culture iconography like comic book characters and pin-up girls. 

The circuses, Wes believes, are key to understanding where Bert’s style formed. He traces the birth of American traditional directly to the rebellious and entrepreneurial culture of the circus trains. 

Before mass media, when fun rolled into town on iron tracks, Wes says the circus was a portal to the exotic and forbidden. 

“Everybody’d get to see the naked lady with tattoos,” Wes says. “They’d get to bet on a prize fight, get to do all these adult things.”

A day later, the whole spectacle would fold up and move to a different town. “So it was sort of tolerated that way,” he says.

Tattoo artists traveled with these troupes, trading tips, techniques and flash art while adapting to the evolving desires of their clientele. Over the decades, innovating and learning from each other, they ultimately codified the aesthetic, creating an entirely new branch of American folk art. That art form, like another great American creative achievement—rock and roll—eventually rose from the working class to widespread, mainstream respectability. 

It was Wes’ grandfather, Gene, who brought the Grimm tradition to KC. 

“He was a Kansas City guy, married a Kansas City girl, and the grandfather and great-grandfather brought me into it,” Wes says. 

The family put down roots in the historic Northeast before moving to the suburbs of south KC. Wes spent his youth steeped in the business, soaking up the history, often trailing his grandfather to motorcycle rallies, races and swap meets to help run the family’s mobile shop. 

In 1980, as a young man, Wes was working on a river towboat, spending 30 days on the water and 30 days off. Late that summer, he learned that the Grimm tattoo had sprouted a new branch in Midtown. 

“I got off the boat—I think it was in August—in Sugar Creek,” Wes says. “I got a cab, told him to stop at 7-Eleven. I went in and got a newspaper and a half pint of Jack Daniels. I came out and opened the newspaper.” There was a picture of Bert and Gene, shirtless and arm-in-arm, announcing their new shop at 38th and Main streets. 

“That’s where I began tattooing,” Wes says. There, a Kansas City institution was born. 

His idea for the Bert Grimm Tattoo Museum was hatched decades later, early in the pandemic. The timing was lucky. In April 2023, after more than four decades in Midtown, a devastating fire totaled the shop on Main Street.

The good news is that Wes had been preserving his family’s legacy for years, amassing a huge collection of his great-grandfather’s memorabilia, including old equipment, photos of Bert and other famed tattoo artists, and, of course, those historic sheets of flash art. 

Mere months later, the new shop, replete with the added moniker of “museum,” was born on Genessee Street. The parlor has since become a mecca not just for locals but for folks from across the country who want to understand the history of this uniquely American artform. They can see that history, quite simply, because of Wes Grimm’s passion, foresight and dedication. The man can’t help himself. Tattoos are in his blood. 

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