JEREMY SWAN

Swan built his first tattoo machine in the winter of 1994 out of a Walkman motor, a bent toothbrush and a guitar string. Two years later he earned a real apprenticeship under Filthy Bill Henderson at Gold Coast Tattoo in Monterey, and stayed seven years, learning the trade in the last days before the internet changed it.

He opened Broken Art at the turn of the millennium and brought it to Los Angeles in 2005, where it has been a cornerstone of the North Eastside art scene ever since. Three decades in, he is comfortable in almost any style, though his own leans new traditional: clean line work, smooth shading, saturated color, and large-scale pieces built to last.

The cover-ups are what he is known for. Two seasons as a featured cover-up artist on TLC’s America’s Worst Tattoos built the reputation, and the work has kept it: taking something a person has spent years hiding and turning it into the thing they roll up a sleeve to show.

As he puts it, tattoo art rides a fine line between the client’s idea and the artist’s interpretation, and the job is to come out the other side with something beautiful, something that stops you where you stand. That is why the consultation matters as much as the needle. He wants you to have a good time and a great tattoo, in that order, and he has thirty years of practice at both.

He still tattoos five days a week. After all that time the part that keeps him in the chair has not changed: someone walks in with an idea they cannot quite put into words, and walks out wearing it.

His own books are closing. They are open until March 2027, and after that he is taking no new clients. The rest of 2027 is reserved for finishing large-scale work. If you have been meaning to sit with him, this is the window.

He is retiring from tattooing, not from Broken Art. Swan continues to own and run the shop, and the crew he has built around him over twenty years keeps tattooing, booking and taking walk-ins exactly as before.