Jeff Johnson was born in coastal Massachusetts and grew up in Winston-Salem, Los Angeles, Houston, Albuquerque, and parts of Missouri. He moved to Portland, Oregon as a runaway fleeing the foster home system at 16, and early on found work as a line cook at the famed Cajun Cafe, where the Portland legacy of James Beard mingled with the magnificent commis circle of Paul Prudhomme. It became an immensely rewarding and transformative yearlong experience where he picked up the creative discipline of the professional kitchen and enough of the culinary arts to spark a lifelong interest in cooking and fine food. Portland had a thriving indie music scene at the time, anchored by the infamous Club Satyricon, The Blue Gallery, and The X-Ray Cafe, and young JJ tore black holes in space with a guitar by night in the punk/blues trio Dirty Bird, and later in the electric blues ensemble Jeff Johnson and The Telephones with the legendary drummer Drawback Slim and the Muddy Waters Award-winning bassist Lisa Mann. He began tattooing professionally at 19, and from 1989 until 2012 worked full-time as a tattoo artist in Portland at the original Sea Tramp Tattoo Company, having an epic blast the entire time. Tattooing changes, just like everything, and JJ remains overjoyed to have lived and worked in the final Outsider Days. The two-headed wolves and slobbering jackals could never stop him from reading at work, either. During this period he drew and supplied graphics to a great many cool cafes and bistros, assorted noteworthy charities, and a variety of snowboard companies. He also wrote short stories, almost all of them science fiction and modern noir, that went on to be published in places like ON SPEC, Weird Tales, Black Petals, and Hinom, to name a few. He became a full-time writer after the publication of his memoir, Tattoo Machine, Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life In Ink. Critical acclaim for the Amazon bestselling The Crimes of Darby Holland Trilogy (Lucky Supreme, A Long Crazy Burn, and The Animals After Midnight) and Deadbomb Bingo Ray cemented his status as a rising voice in crime fiction, and he’s been branching out ever since, with the literary novel Knottspeed: A Love Story, the modern urban fantasy Everything Under The Moon, and now the fabulist novella I Shop At Laney’s. He’s been in Rolling Stone, Reuters, TIME, enjoyed several inglorious stints on NPR, and he’s been favorably reviewed by The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The London Times, The Missoulian, and many more. He often works as a screenwriter (whatever, the money is good, don’t judge) and he still occasionally tattooes, doing infrequent guest spots around the world and occasionally filling in as an emergency zapper at various West Coast shops, and he continues to rock the mighty with his San Fransisco-based gentleman psychonaut band The Chasteens. He has two feature films in development, Lemonade, with Lucky Penny (Tony Dennison/The Closer) and Sternman Productions (Thomas Hildreth/Vandal) and Moto Gaucho with Keef Army Films. Johnson is set to direct Moto Gaucho. His short film, The Kinjiku, written and directed by Johnson, was produced by Sternman Productions and the Academy Award winning producer of Crash, Mark Harris.

JJ’s new series of paintings, Camels and Bees In Red, is officially stalled because he’s not working on them, they’re too big, they’re taking forever, and he’s traveling.

JJ is incredibly delighted to be married to the comic book artist, painter, and cheerful woodland elf Sylvia Mann. They currently live in Southeast Asia.

Above, El Jefe tattooing a local rocker dude in Portland, Oregon, circa 2012. Dudeboy is smiling because JJ often sings while he works, but he does not know the words to even one song, not even the ones he wrote himself, so he makes them up as he goes along.

One of the gazillion tattoos done by Jeff, this one circa 1998, two pirate babes riding a seahorse. This isn’t a tattoo site, but it seemed important to include at least one pic and this one says it all, perfectly encapsulating in a single image some shady days under a shade tree.