"I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? But sometimes, there's a man - and I'm talkin' about the Dude here - sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there." - The Stanger, The Big Lebowski
Regardless of how you feel about Christian Audigier's douchebag regalia and licensing empire (and I call it his because the only things Hardy contributed were old flash and his name (and in return he was fucked out of a lot of money and got his "brand" so diluted that few of those charmed by it even knew "Ed Hardy" was a tattoo artist)), if you participate in contemporary tattooing culture - custom tattooing being the norm, sleeves and body suits being common, conventions legitimizing the industry while magazines show off its finest work, the availability of Japanese-influenced work, and good tattooing being recognizable as art - then you owe Ed Hardy a debt of gratitude.
Don Ed showed up on the American tattooing scene when no other art school educated types would ever consider getting into such a dirty, terminal folk tradition. What he saw there was an assembly line attitude dominated by the applying of small 19th Century designs to the biceps of sailors, with few colors extant and little originality to speak of. Fast forward a few years of networking through Sailor Jerry Collins, and Hardy was the first Westerner to ever tattoo in Japan. There he was blown away by the art style and the heritage, but once again found a small, subcultural population of customers getting tattooed, all pulling from a limited number of designs, hailing from 19th Century images buttressed by a rigid folklore tradition. So he returned to America to do what essentially no one else was doing: he eschewed having any flash in his shop and rather than direct customers to traditional images exclusively tattooed whatever they wanted to have tattooed on them, with a distinctly Japanese willingness to envelope the body rather than just have small, iconic tattoos be merely contained within it (hence his business card of the era reading "Wear Your Dreams").
He also nurtured a chip in his shoulder about the legitimacy of tattooing as a fine art form, and through putting beautiful ink on the hippest of the bay area's residents for 30-40 years, pioneering the concept of tattooing conventions, and founding the first-ever tattoo art magazine, Tattootime, he contributed to a change of course in not only tattooing culture, but also the perceptions held by both the art world and mainstream society.
In essence he's the Bob Dylan of tattooing: he took a centuries-old folk tradition, learned how to do it from the literal best, played fast and loose with the rules of that tradition, and, through extreme talent and an uncompromising work ethic elevated a humble medium to the level of global culture and fine art. (Now, I quote The Big Lebowski above because a lot of this had to do with timing: he wasn't the only tattoo artist consciously supplanting the past in the 1970s, and many other phenomena going on in our culture at large contributed to making these changes in attitudes possible. Also bear in mind that I intentionally call him Dylan (and not, for instance, Jesus), because Dylan himself neither invented folk or rock music nor was the first person to write original songs, he was just the very best at a time that was ripe for massive change and he anticipated the ways that things could and should change for his own underappreciated corner of the art world.)
All that said, this book is a reflective as-told autobiography of the sort that tend to be dictated to ghostwriters by former sports champions and ex Navy SEALs, and suffers from issues that are often avoided when the biographer is an enthusiastic professional but otherwise an unconnected third party. For instance, the timeline is very evenly spread across the page count - equal weight is given to learning to tattoo from Phil Sparrow as is given to stuff like getting back into surfing as a late-middle-aged man and finally adopting a dog. Many notable figures in tattoo world are also featured (Bert Grimm, Lyle Tuttle, Phil Sparrow, Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins, Don Nolan, Pinky Yun, Jack Rudy, Mike "Rollo Banks" Mallone, Thom DeVita, and Henk Shiffmacher, among others) but while most get a detailed enough description of who they are/were, only Sailor Jerry gets fleshed out much as a character, and Hardy relies on the reader knowing a thing or two about who he's talking about - much in the way someone like Michael Jordan wouldn't feel the need to tell you all too much about Scottie Pippin in his biography, Hardy feels too safe in the notion that you're more or less on the level with the people and events being described and only came for the "story" of it all.
Going on the cultural history described alone, I'd give this book five stars, but it is brought down by being merely passable in writing. While it will meet the needs of a casual tattoo history enthusiast that wants a good sketch of the causes for the transition into the contemporary tattooing era, it still remains a basic celebrity biography in tone and structure.
Perhaps after Hardy dies a better writer will work with the Hardy estate to create a more thorough and definitive biography, and hopefully it includes a lot of full-color photos. Or perhaps Alan Govenar's Ed Hardy: Art for Life is the book I'm imagining (which is oddly credited to Hardy on both Amazon and Goodreads, despite being written by the same academic folklorist who wrote the genre classic Stoney Knows Best. It seems few people are putting enough effort into the editing of and marketing of tattoo books, and I can only guess it's because those interested enough in tattooing to read books about it tend to be tattooers themselves, and either are often too busy practicing the art to navel-gaze about it, or are too familiar from the oral tradition to bother reading a written recounting, or, if they're really old school, are functionally illiterate). I'll eventually get around to checking it out, and draw what conclusions I can.