One of my favorite things about going through old tattoo convention photos, back when there were only a few a year and they mostly catered to the very niche tattoo community of the era, is that convention to convention, event to event, you mostly saw the same handful of faces.
You could chart their tattoo collection over the years, see the lines on their faces deepen, the crowd they ran with expanding and, as time went on and age became an issue, shrinking.
One of those faces was John Fairy III, who wore an impressive collection of tattoos including work by Cliff Raven. John, or Professor Fairy as the students would call him during his impressive thirty year tenure at Clemson University, was a passionate botanist whose research involved monitoring the floristic health of isolated plant communities affected by state-wide industrial development.
John passed in 2015. The generation of tattoo (and piercing/modification) enthusiasts that he represented remain a favorite of mine.
