10,000 tattoos later, artist is still going strong.
By: Leon Tovey
JAMESBURG "If you walk into a shop and it doesn’t look like this, walk out," Ed Spinelli says.
It requires only a cursory glance around Mr. Spinelli’s tattoo parlor, Heritage Tattooing on Willow Street, to see what he means: The floors and countertops in the shop’s gallery are clean enough to eat off; the surfaces in the work area are clean enough for surgery.
All told, the shop with its gleaming white walls, bright fluorescent lights and spotless, blue, wall-to-wall carpeting looks more like a dentist’s office than the sort of grungy, biker-centric den of depravity some people still envision when they hear the words "tattoo parlor."
Mr. Spinelli, a stocky man in his mid-40s with a shaved head, a goatee and a sheath of tattoos covering each arm, says that resemblance is the standard in tattoo parlors these days.
As tattooing has become more popular among mainstream Americans mother-daughter outings account for some of Heritage’s business health concerns have driven tattoo parlors to become cleaner and more regulated, Mr. Spinelli says.
"And it goes both ways," he says. "These safety procedures are for the tattooist as much as for the people getting tattoos."
The cleanliness and order of modern tattoo parlors also comes naturally to Mr. Spinelli, a retired Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer, who opened Heritage in September 2003 "as a kind of therapy thing," he said.
When Mr. Spinelli retired from the Port Authority police force in August of 2003, after 23 years of service, he says he was still reeling from the shock and stress of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which he witnessed firsthand.
At the time of the attacks, Mr. Spinelli was a special operations sergeant commanding the department’s motorcycle unit. He and his unit had been providing security at an electrician’s strike at the World Trade Center for 10 days straight prior to the attack and on Sept. 11, he had given his men the day off.
He was on his way to breakfast riding down Manhattan’s West Side Highway, just about to Canal Street, he recalls when the second plane hit the South Tower.
"I felt the heat from the explosion," Mr. Spinelli says. "If we hadn’t been called off that strike the day before, we would’ve all been there. We would have been inside those towers when they came down."
As it was, Mr. Spinelli says, he rushed to the site of the attacks and joined the search for survivors civilians, firefighters and police. In the end, the Port Authority police lost 37 officers in the chaos and heroism of that day.
"Everyone of those guys, I knew," Mr. Spinelli says quietly. "And the next three months, we did funerals three, four a day.
"One Saturday, we did five," he said.
As the second anniversary of the attacks approached, Mr. Spinelli decided to retire. The department had changed; many of his oldest friends were gone and he felt it was time to try something different.
"I thought I’d like to just spend some time alone," he says. "I decided to open up a tattoo shop, thinking it would just be me with a few customers, when I wanted that sort of thing."
Mr. Spinelli started tattooing as a hobby in the late 1980s after moving from New York to Millstone, where he and his family still live. He was working the evening shift for the department at the time and because his wife worked days in the city, he says he "needed something to do during the days."
He started spending so much time at K&B Tattooing in Hightstown that the parlor’s late owner, Kenny Pullman, finally asked him one day if he’d like to learn how to tattoo.
"The first thing I did was a rose on a guy’s calf," he says. "That was about 10,000 tattoos ago."
Twenty years after giving that first tattoo, Mr. Spinelli is licensed by the New Jersey Department of Health as are all legal commercial tattoo artists and a member of the Alliance of Professional Tattooists, a nonprofit professional standards organization established in 1992.
Since opening his shop which is named for his motorcycle, a Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail in the borough in 2003, Mr. Spinelli has taken on two apprentice tattoo artists, Joe Capalupo and Joe Craparata.
Business at the shop has been a mix of first-timers, touch-ups and repair jobs, Mr. Spinelli says. He gives or directly supervises (apprentice tattoo artists must perform a minimum of 1,000 supervised hours before they can work alone) all the tattoos in the shop.
He has a few regular customers, people who spend hours in the chair, under the machine ("it’s never called a tattoo gun, but a tattoo machine," he says) for months at a time.
"Those are the diehards," he says. "And they spend thousands of dollars."
Mr. Spinelli counts former New Jersey high school basketball phenomenon and current New Orleans Hornets guard J.R. Smith among his favorite regulars. Photos of Mr. Smith’s tattoos get prominent play on the shop’s Web site, www.heritagetattooing.com, as do a collection of Sept. 11 memorial tattoos Mr. Spinelli has done for firemen and police.
But one service the shop doesn’t perform is piercings.
"We’re one of the rare tattoo shops," he tells a 16-year-old girl who enters the shop one Friday afternoon, accompanied by her father, wanting her nose pierced. "Try Fat Kat, down in Aberdeen."
The girl’s father then shows Mr. Spinelli a tattoo on his shoulder a blue-tinged shield with several names written across it and asks whether he could remove one of the names and add another.
Mr. Spinelli studies the tattoo, nods his head and explains what he would do to fix it. The man considers for a moment, agrees and sets a time to come back.
As the door closes behind the two, Mr. Spinelli pulls up the sleeves of his black T-shirt, revealing his meaty biceps. There’s a tattoo of his son on the left bicep and one of his daughter on the right.
His daughter will celebrate her 17th birthday in April and the encounter he’s just had seems to remind him of her. The minimum age to get a tattoo in New Jersey is 16, with parental consent (photo identification and a birth certificate required), and his daughter has been after him on the subject.
"She wants one, but my wife won’t let her," Mr. Spinelli says with a laugh. "The consent form requires a signature from just one parent or guardian, but I don’t plan to push my luck she’ll just have to wait."
Walk-ins are accepted at Heritage, but appointments are encouraged. For more information including pricing call (732) 656-7717.