10/26/2026
On This Day In Tattoo History: Mary Jane Haake was born Salt Lake City, UT, in 1951. She is known as a tattoo artist and authority on medical tattooing and permanent makeup; she introduced topical anesthetics to the tattooing and body modification industries.
She first saw tattooing by a man with a train tattoo running from his arm to his chest. While working in an office in Portland, OR, she found Bert Grimm’s tattoo shop and got her first tattoo. She started visiting Grimm, later becoming an apprentice under him. She attended college, and wrote her thesis on tattooing, and became the first person to get a degree in tattooing from a university.
During her apprenticeship with Grimm, she learned how to camouflage scars and recreate hair with fine lines, techniques with Grim learned in World War 1. Haake transformed this into lips, eyebrows, and disguising surgical scars. This parlayed her into permanent makeup.
She then experimented with different products with chemists to develop topical anesthetics for tattooing; her work paved the way for the various products we have today.
Her Wikipedia page has more information on her development process.
(images and text adapted from Wikipedia)
