Ink The Original David Lee Roth 's skincare line specifically designed to preserve, protect, and enhance tattoos and prevent fading, has apparently closed its doors.
Visitors to the official Ink The Original website are now being redirected to a page titled “INK the original – Closing” and are greeted by an image containing the message: “First, our favorite restaurant, the bookstore on the corner, now us. What a long journey it has been…”
The phrase "What a long, great trip it's been..." is the same one Roth used when mourning the death of Van Halen guitarist Eddie Van Halen in October 2020.
Van Halen's lead singer first spoke about his involvement with Ink The Original in a 2018 interview with Vogue. Regarding his involvement in the tattoo maintenance business, Roth said: “Simple: the product we’re dealing with now goes hand in hand with what I think is the true Esperanto: it’s a language (ink) that everyone shares, especially if you don’t speak the same language. With ink, we read each other’s signs and icons. In that way, it’s very much like music.”
He recounted that he started the project with three other people, sitting around an overturned plastic bucket in his Los Angeles home. “Now, we are 34 and have offices in New York and LA. It took three years and almost $7 million, and I’m involved in every element of every part of it. Surprisingly, there’s almost no competition,” he stated.
“What we’ve built is absolutely specialized for our community. My business partner, Ami James , is the curator and one of the three owners of Tattoodo, which has over 500,000 curated artists on its website. They get 2 billion views per month and have 20 million followers on social media.”
Asked when he first became interested in tattoos, Roth said he got his first tattoo over 40 years ago. “A little seahorse on my ankle, at a place called Cliff Raven Studio on Sunset Boulevard in 1977, 1978. That was very strange,” he said.
He also mentions that the only people who got tattoos at the time were motorcyclists, rock 'n' roll to a small degree; the gay community was more involved in it.
“Eventually, though, I took a much more gentrified approach: I waited until I was 60 and managed to get a Japanese classic tattoo. It took me 300 hours sitting over two years. But I planned it for the previous 30 years, and it’s my design: kabuki faces, the original showbiz, Edo style rendered – it looks like a woodblock print,” he concluded.