Archive, studio honors the art of the skin

"The first 20 times I watched MTV, I kept a pencil and a pad of paper next to me," C.W. Eldridge confesses. "Every time that I saw a tattoo in a video, I would make a little mark on the paper and, man, at the end of an hour, there might be 40 or more."

The fact that Eldridge spent the early 1980s charting the amount of ink in Iron Maiden videos shouldn't be surprising, not for a man who has spent more than 40 years immersed in tattoo culture, both as a collector and as a custom artist.

His Fourth Street storefront, The Tattoo Archive, is part museum, part studio and is without a doubt one of the coolest ways you can spend an afternoon in Downtown Winston-Salem. Whether you're covered in more ink than the carpet at Kinko's or the closest you've come to a tattoo was writing "Buy milk" on the back of your hand, you'll still appreciate Eldridge's passion for the needle-powered art form and his knowledge of the artists who have — literally — left their indelible marks on history.

The walls, shelves and hallways of his shop are covered in paintings and posters, antiques, and one-of-a-kind artifacts, but the earliest pieces of his collection are kept in a more … permanent location. "This all started with the tattoos I wear," Eldridge said. "A sailing ship was my first tattoo, when I joined the Navy."

Eldridge, an Elkin native, served four years in the Navy, stationed everywhere from Texas to the Gulf of Tonkin, and he redecorated his forearms with every stop along the way. After leaving the service, he landed in Southern California, where his interest in tattooing led to an apprenticeship with a legendary artist. "I was getting tattooed in San Francisco when the fellow I was getting tattooed from offered to teach me."

That fellow, as Eldridge casually refers to him, was Ed Hardy, known as "The Godfather of Modern Tattoo." Hardy's signature designs of dragons and tigers and anchors are the ones that currently appear on those T-shirts worn by everyone from Sylvester Stallone to thirtysomething soccer moms to reality schlub Jon Gosselin.

"Ed Hardy is retired from tattooing now but he's probably one of the best that America has ever had," Eldridge says. "But if you ask 10 people who the best tattooer was, you'd probably get at least seven different answers. It's totally subjective."

After working in Hardy's Tattoo City, Eldridge inked his way up and down the Pacific Coast before opening his own studio in Berkeley, Calif. He began to display some of his acquisitions there and the Tattoo Archive was born. Since then, he's visited antique stores and estate auctions around the world, enthusiastically collecting passport stamps and pieces for the Archive. "You find things when you're not looking for them sometimes. Sometimes they come through the mail slot."

Despite all the media and memorabilia that fill his shop, some of Eldridge's most prized possessions are some of the smallest. "I have around 20,000 business cards from other tattooers, some dating back to the 1800s," he says. "A business card is a very personal thing. It tells a lot about the artist, reflects his sense of humor and his professionalism."

"Plus," he says with a laugh, "They're easy to store. Imagine if you were an anvil collector!"

In the past 40 years, Eldridge has watched as interest in tattoos and acceptance of those who wear them has grown. When asked who gets the credit for bringing ink away from bikers and sailors and onto bankers and real estate agents, he looks toward cable TV.

"I really believe that MTV was one of the factors that contributed to the modern popularity of tattooing," he says. "In our culture, if we see it on TV, it's real, especially back in that period (when MTV debuted). All these tattooed people were being brought into our living rooms, so it was only natural that the people watching those videos would want to get tattooed like their rock star heroes were."

The Tattoo Archive is also a working studio, where Eldridge and a second artist, Daniel Ferguson, practice their craft.

"We do a lot of first tattoos," he says. "We actually get a lot of people who walk in and, as soon as they clear the door, they confess that they've never been in a tattoo shop before. We're kind of nonthreatening that way."