In a wide ranging interview with Vogue, David Lee Roth talked Van Halen, money, and tattoos. His latest business venture is a line of skin care products called "Ink The Original", designed to preserve, protect and highlight your tattoos.
On starting the business he said, "I started this project with three of us sitting around an upended plastic bucket for a table at my house in L.A. Now, there's 34 of us and we have offices in New York as well as L.A. It's taken three years and close to $7 million, and I'm involved in every single element of every part of it. Surprisingly, there's almost no competition. And what we have built is absolutely specialized to our community."
Asked about his own personal ink he said, "I got my first tattoo 40 years ago, a little seahorse on my ankle, at a place called Cliff Raven Studio on Sunset Boulevard in '77, '78. That was very outré then — the only people who got tattoos then were bikers, rock 'n' rollers to a small degree; the gay community was into it. Eventually, though, I took a much more gentrified approach: I waited until I was 60 and got the whole Japanese tuxedo. It took me 300 hours of sitting over two years. But I planned it for the 30 years prior, and it's my design: kabuki faces, the original showbiz, rendered Edo style — it looks like a woodblock print."
So, if you're interested in preserving that tattoo of Wally The Green Monster that you drunkenly got after the Red Sox World Series victory, check out their line of products here at Ink The Original.