Elizabeth Weinzirl

Elizabeth Halberstadt was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1902, her father a tattooed seafaring man and her mother was a seamstress.The family settled in the Seattle area when Elizabeth was 11. As a teenager, Elizabeth went on a cross-country adventure in a Model T Ford with other family members. They drove from Seattle, back to Brooklyn, New York in 6 weeks and back again with her mother and cousin, traveling some on the Lincoln Highway. At 18, Elizabeth enrolled in the University of Washington, that was in 1920. She later married Adolph Weinzirl, a medical student, in 1925 and moved to Portland, Oregon in 1937. Her tattoo journey started with a butterfly on her left thigh in 1947 by Max Pelz..

She later told the LA Times newspaper, “My husband wanted a tattooed wife, and I loved him very much and I was eager to do things to please him. And so I got a tattoo, and then I thought ‘that’s it.’ Then later he said: ‘Don’t you think it’s time for another one?’ By the time I got the third one, I started getting interested myself. It’s something we did together, and he’s gone, and that’s that.” Adolph, a medical school professor, had only two tattoos himself, his Social Security number and a “drinking dot.” Elizabeth said that the tattooist who put the dot on her husband had told him: “That’s a drinking dot. If you see two of them, you’ve had too much.”

       
In that first year she was also tattooed by Frank Martin also in Seattle. Later that year fate brought her to the legendary Bert Grimm and she was on the road to becoming the Worlds Number One Tattoo Fan. In the 1950's when Bert Grimm was in Long Beach California, Elizabeth would travel with Adolph to get more work on her bodysuit.

Featured on Jack Linkletter’s TV show in 1958, Elizabeth was an eager proponent of the tattoo as bodyart. Adolf died in 1967 and Elizabeth settled into her home in Greshem Oregon. She went to her first tattoo convention in 1976. Elizabeth was welcomed as royalty within the burgeoning tattoo community at large. She was voted fan of the year that year, again in 1977 in Reno and then again in 1979 in Denver. Don Nolan reworked some of Berts work on her in 1981 and the National Tattoo Association established the Elizabeth Weinzirl Award for Enthusiast of the Year. Elizabeth was also inducted into the first Tattoo Hall of Fame in 1981. In 1984 she was featured on Japanese television. She was loved by one and all who met her, known as the "Tattooed Grandma", she corresponded with artists and tattoo fans all over the world. Elizabeth died on September 8 1993.