TATTOO MUSEUMS—PERSONAL ART STUDIO

Mike and Mary Skiver have owned and operated Personal Art Studio?—actually, now there are two locations—since 1981. Mary tattoos at the Cumberland, Maryland location, while Mike pushes ink at the Somerset, Pennsylvania site, which also houses his world-famous, four-story tattoo memorabilia museum. Built in 1873, the enormous structure—"It takes nearly two hours to see everything," says Mike?was once a church, a bar, a pool hall and a hardware store.

As Mike relates in Mary Gardner's Big 10 interview in the September issue of SKIN&INK: "I was in my thirties before I got into tattooing professionally. Oh sure, I'd been hand-dabbling forty or more years ago. I was a millwright, a certified pipe welder working in grain elevators. I was making hazard pay, because it was such dangerous work. Having started a family, I had to work for a living. But all my life I always drew. I had a party at my big ol' fourteen-room house on Kent Island, on the eastern shore of Maryland, and one of my motorcycle friends Martin McDonough (Duck for short), rest in peace, saw some of my drawings and told me to start tattooing. Three years later, in the late '70s, I sold my house, took several thousand dollars and bought some tattoo equipment. When the equipment arrived, however, it didn't come with any instructions."

Utilizing the hand-to-eye coordination from years as a welder, Mike began to master the art of tattooing. "If I went slower, I got a thicker line, faster a thinner line," was one of the epiphanies Mike experienced along the way. Then Lyle Tuttle put a bug in Mike's ear about collecting. What started out as a collection of few machines has grown to over seven hundred?famous ones, rare ones, tricked-out ones.

Collecting has always been a major feature in Mike's tattoo life. As long as I have seen him at conventions, there is always an ample display of collectible tattoo machines and paraphernalia at his booth. Yes, he's an old-school tattooer, but his heart is in caretaking tattoo history and sharing the information with anyone who asks. I recall vividly the day he ran up to me at a tattoo event with the news of his latest discovery.

"I traded tattooing with this guy who had, he told me, some sheets of original Bert Grimm flash. As usual, I was interested but dubious. It turned out that there were nearly one hundred fifty sheets." And then he took me over to his booth and shared, one by one, the treasures that he had just traded for some machines and tattoo work. Mike's been into tattooing for over forty years, but, that day, he was like a little kid who'd just scored some baseball trading cards.

Visit the museum, first chance you get, There are over thirty display cases of real-deal tattoo memorabilia in this, the largest collection of American folk art on the East Coast.

Mike Skiver. He lives the life. He is the life. And he's safeguarding our history for the future.

Personal Art Studio & Museum
132 South Center Avenue
Somerset, Pennsylvania 15501
(814) 445-6333
Private tours only. Appointment necessary.