You see, this ain’t my regular job. I’m working here because my profession is played out in San Francisco. I’m a dermograph artist. What’s that? Oh, it’s what most people call a tattooer. But don’t you think we’ve got as much right to be called artists as the fellows that slap paint on cloth with a brush? I think so. Is anything nicer than the human skin? Don’t you fix up your walls and your ceilings, and your floors that you wipe your feet on? Then what’s the matter with decorating yourself? That’s the line of talk I always gave people when they asked me why I called myself a dermograph artist. It was the electric needle and the Jap tattooer that ran me out of business. With the electric needle, a man could put on a design in about a quarter of the time that it takes to do a real artistic job by hand. The blamed little Jap would pretty near pay to get a customer, he worked that cheap. I quit, and I never get out my needles now except for a design on some one in the baths. My parlours were on the water-front, because most of my customers were sailors. Of course, once in a while some swells from Nob Hill would come in for a design or two. I used to do my best work for them, because, I thought, you never can tell when these society people will get next to the fact that a picture on the skin has it a mile on a painting. Why, the other day I read in the papers that a Frenchman got a hundred thousand dollars for a little, dinky canvas painting. The highest pay I ever knew a dermograph artist to get was five hundred for doing the Wells Brothers’ tattooed woman. Do you call that square? After the Jap and the electric needle chump came to town, business fell off, as I was telling you. They’d have made me close up my shop and get out if it hadn’t been for Spotty Crigg. Ever hear of him? Well, you sure haven’t been in San Francisco long. In those days he kept a sailor boarding-house and saloon round the corner from my parlours, and he was sort of boss of the water-front—good any time to deliver five hundred votes. I ain’t saying that Spotty was a Sunday-school kind of man, but he stuck to his friends. I was one of the gang, so he sent me enough jobs to keep me going. Besides, I helped him once or twice on a shanghaing deal. You see, like most sailor boarding-house keepers in those days, he was a crimp—used to deliver a sailor or two when foremast hands were scarce and the pay was good. Spotty Crigg is dead now, or I wouldn’t be telling you about his last and biggest shanghaing scrape. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I learned about it afterward, part from Crigg and part from people on the other side of the little deal.