Meet the High Priest of Hollywood Tattoo Artists
by Gary Baum
Photographed By Brian Bowen Smith
Johnny Depp calls him brother. Adele and Angelina are clients. After 40 years of body ink, Mark Mahoney, whose style now dominates the craft, has become an icon of the Sunset Strip.
A life spent injecting ink into flesh has taken Mark Mahoney, Hollywood’s most influential and respected tattoo artist, across the human experience. He began tattooing drunk Hell’s Angels beneath a swastika flag in a Massachusetts motorcycle club, then made his way for a time to Manhattan, where he set up shop at the bohemian Chelsea Hotel. (Sid Vicious was a client.) Now, with the fully mainstream acceptance of what was an outlaw aesthetic when he started in the business 40 years ago, he finds his booked-six-months-out appointment calendar filled with green-juice-toting “mothers and their daughters from Beverly Hills. I feel like I’m dreaming.”
Also stars: David Beckham is covered in Mahoney’s work, a fine-line style involving solely black-and-gray ink known as “single needle” that he has popularized — and that a coterie of younger practitioners has propagated on increasingly dewier millennial dermis. Other clients include Adele, Angelina Jolie, Rihanna, Jared Leto and Lana Del Rey, who cast him as her muse in two music videos.
In the past, he offered his services to rivals 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. — the latter just days before he was killed. (Quincy Jones has joked that musicians thank “God and Mark Mahoney” at the Grammys; awards season in general is particularly busy for him, with extra house calls and visits to the Four Seasons hotel on Doheny Drive.) Longtime patron and friend Mickey Rourke stopped calling to get together after he couldn’t be squeezed in before a boxing match in Russia. “People have told me he’s gettin’ over it,” says Mahoney. “But it breaks my f—in’ heart.”