The first retrospective of Ed Hardy describes him as a talented artist

"I'm part of a continuum," said Hardy about his artistic idols. "There is much more to my life than tattooing."

One of the first pieces of "Deeper than Skin" is a 1967 print entitled "Future Plans", in which Hardy, then undergraduate, presented only a few tattoos and presented himself as completely inked. The exhibition ends in a circle with his final image, an enlarged photo of 2009 from a hardy to bare-chested and tattooed, became a full-fledged artist who retired from tattooing through manna financial of the clothing brand.

Visitors can get a projected animation of a Hardy tattoo drawing "applied" on their skin. They can also walk along a snake roll, hanging from the ceiling, on which Hardy painted 2,000 dragons in 2000.

"Ed Hardy is the only tattoo artist in the western world to deserve a show like this," said Matt Lodder, a professor at Esbad University, who studies the tattoo story as a ### 39, art. "Tattoos of a particular fashion all work, whether they know it or not, according to some sort of scheme that Ed Hardy was the first to fix."

When Hardy began tattooing in 1967 after abandoning his project of attending the Yale Art School, he was one of the few American tattooists with a background in fine arts. Hardy was also the first Western tattoo artist to study Japanese traditional tattooing abroad. Upon returning to the United States, Hardy merged these techniques with American marine and military tattoo types to develop his signature style: colorful hearts, clouds, dragons, daggers, roses, and ribbons with bold, black contours.

In 1974, Hardy ceased to offer pre-designed "flash" tattoos to tailor-made work, an approach that is now the norm. Before Hardy, no other tattoo shop worked that way. The exhibition features pencil sketches and custom watercolors by Hardy under photographs of the works inked on the human body.

"It's quite shocking to some people that we can go from an exhibition of Monet's paintings to a tattoo artist's exhibition," said Breuer.

The De Young offers discounts to tattooed visitors in order to attract a wider audience. The retrospective, which runs until October 6, marks a shift in sensitivity in the art world while museums consider tattooing as a fine art.