"Customers Carry my Art Everywhere" Tattoo Sign by Earl Brown [Flash - Folk Art - trade sign - Advertising - WWII]
(American, ca. 1945)
Exceptional hand-painted tattoo shop sign depicting a heavily tattooed arm holding a tattoo machine, by Hubert Earl Brown (1904?1983), American, ca. 1945. Featuring colorful traditional tattoo designs, including a panther, dragon, skulls, roses, and patriotic motifs, with applied lettering reading ?Customers Carry My Art Everywhere.? The tattoo machine is inscribed ?Earl Brown.? Ink and watercolor on board, covered with contact paper. Accompanied by a separate sheet of paper bearing a hand-painted ?Earl Brown? inscription in Chinese-style lettering, formerly taped over the original sign.

Provenance: Passed down by ?Honest Mitch? Mitchell (1947?2001) of Trader Bob?s Tattoo, St. Louis, Missouri; to a private collector.

Hubert Earl Brown (1904?1983) was an American tattoo artist who worked throughout the South and Midwest from the 1930s through the 1960s. Born in Missouri, he tattooed in St. Louis, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and Biloxi, Mississippi, where he worked alongside Bob Shaw in the 1950s. By the 1960s, he was tattooing out of Trader Bob?s in St. Louis.
11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm.)

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