Revolutionized the Art of Tattooing

Thom Devita at his home in Newburgh, N.Y., in 2014. “His work was original and expressionist, full of this kind of crazy vitality that was very different from the contained and careful look of tattoos,”

There was a time in New York City when, if you wanted to get inked, you had to know a guy.

Tattooing was banned by the city's Health Department in 1961 after the practice was blamed for an outbreak of hepatitis. The ban lasted until 1997.

There were just eight or so artists who operated from their living rooms or at kitchen tables in squalid corners of the city, like the Lower East Side.

Your choice of art was limited: patriotic symbols, a declaration of love, or an anchor or other recycled image from the craft’s seafaring tradition. Then there was Thom DeVita.

While other tattoo artists offered a rigid set of images and styles, he designed one-of-a-kind tattoos, blending high art, primitivism, Japanese designs and classic Americana. But getting a DeVita tattoo was always a gamble: What you saw on the wall wasn’t necessarily what showed up on your arm.

“I don’t tattoo like a stamp, each one exactly the same,” Mr. DeVita said in a 1991 interview for the magazine Tattootime.

Mr. DeVita, whose unconventional aesthetic helped usher in the modern era of tattooing, died on April 5 at 85 at his home in Newburgh, N.Y. His wife, Jennifer DeVita, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

In New York City, Mr. DeVita’s apartment near Eighth Street and Avenue C was one of the earliest custom tattoo shops, where clients could paint their bodies with original artwork. He was also arguably the first American artist to create tribal tattoos, abstract graphic designs, which he borrowed from designs he found in National Geographic magazine and an image he saw on a New York City manhole cover.

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