Tattooing at Spider Webb's, 1974 (Patreon)

In 1974, Sailor Sid Diller visited the Mount Vernon, NY to visit tattoo artist Spider Webb. Luckily for us, he brought along his video camera- likely 8mm or 16mm- to capture footage from his visit. 

The film was converted in the 1980s and put on VHS tape- the source of this video- so there's years of magnetic tape degradation on top of the lower quality film to VHS technology that was available when this was transferred; it's very much a "something is better than nothing" kind of thing.

Spider Webb (Joseph O'Sullivan) is one of the most important figures in contemporary Western tattoo history. He's spent the majority of his life pushing to have tattooing considered a fine art- through happenings like tattooing Annie Sprinkle on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during NYC's tattoo ban (1961-1994), hosting events where the 1970s NYC art establishment (including Marcia Tucker of the Whitney) rubbed elbows with heavily tattooed clients, creating anaglyph 3D tattoos, the ambitious X 1000 project (where he tattooed a small X on 1000 people and then 1000 X's on one person, as documented by Charles Gatewood and Marco Vassi in the book X1000), and conceptual stunts like loading shotgun shells with dry tattoo pigment to, paraphrasing, shoot a tattoo on a motherfucker. 

He's currently in North Carolina where he maintains his voluminous tattoo archives and collection.