Jeff Johnson was born to bewildered Ozark bean pickers in a windy coastal town in Massachusetts and grew up in Winston-Salem, Los Angeles, Houston, Albuquerque, and the poorest parts of Missouri. He moved to Portland, Oregon as a runaway fleeing the foster home system at the tender age of 16, incredibly with no shoes and three dollars, and he not only lived but prospered. The City of Roses was a fine place to be dangerously poor in those days, and early on, in a stroke of incredible good fortune, Jeff 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. The average cook lasted three harrowing months in that grueling, supercharged environment, but for young JJ it was wonderland and became an immensely rewarding and transformative yearlong experience, where he picked up the iron creative discipline of the kitchen and learned enough of the culinary arts to spark a lifelong interest in cooking, fine food, and associated dickhole snobbery. 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 New Mexico transplant trio Dirty Bird, and later in the electric blues ensemble Jeff Johnson and The Telephones with the legendary drummer Drawback Slim and Muddy Waters Award-winning bassist Lisa Mann. He began tattooing professionally when he was 19, and from 1989 until 2014 he worked full-time as a tattoo artist in Portland, having an epic blast the entire time. Tattooing changes with the years like anything with juice, and JJ remains overjoyed to have lived and worked in the final Outsider Days, a kind of twilight period that might also be thought of as The Great Carnie Encore. Jeff alone watched good movies, dined well, and generally enjoyed a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and the two-headed wolves and slobbering jackals could never stop him from reading at work, either. During this period he also drew and supplied graphics to a great many cool cafes and bistros, assorted noteworthy charities, and a variety of dipshit snowboard companies. He also wrote many short stories, almost all of them science fiction, and they went on to be published in places like ON SPEC, Weird Tales, and Black Petals, to name just a few. Around this time the golden age science fiction legend Robert Sheckley lived in Jeff’s guest room for nearly a year, and while that was a great time, JJ credits Robert J. Sawyer and KW Jeter for giving him the valuable writing advice that set him on the road to today. Bob the Wise was more of a lifestyle adviser, confidant, and true blue buddy. He became a full-time writer (and later a ghostwriter, journalist, editor, essayist, and screenwriter) after the publication of his first book, Tattoo Machine, Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life In Ink. Critical acclaim for The Crimes of Darby Holland Trilogy and Deadbomb Bingo Ray cemented his status as a rising voice in noir, and he’s been branching out ever since, with the modern urban fantasy Everything Under The Moon and now the science mystery 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 works when time permits on his Creole-New Mexican fusion cookbook, Hot Food For The Cool People Here, and still occasionally tattooes, doing infrequent guest spots around the world and occasionally filling in as an emergency tat zapper at various West Coast shops, and he continues to rock the mighty with his San Fransisco-based gentleman psychonaut band The Chasteens. He plans to retire thirty-plus years from now in a stylish Maltese prison, where he will work in the library as a contraband smuggler and pen his final epic memoir, A Smoothie From Springfield, Mo.

JJ’s new series of paintings, Camels and Bees In Red, is taking forever.

JJ is married to the comic book artist, painter, and cheerful woodland elf Sylvia Mann.

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 actually 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 one pic and this one says it all, perfectly encapsulating in a single image some shady days under a shade tree.