There are Ed Hardy stores in New York, Los Angeles, Tucson and Dubai. That $20 million-a-year business, of which Hardy gets a small slice for licensing his name and art, is the handiwork of French-born marketing expert Christian Audigier, who pushed the Von Dutch brand and now has everybody from Madonna to Larry King draped in Hardy. It's a satisfying turn of events for an artist who made his bones tattooing daggered hearts and anchors on sailors in San Diego in the raffish old days before body art became respectable. Now it nearly looks as if there's a Starbucks and a tattoo parlor on every corner.

Ed Hardy, a modest, forthright and amusing man who in 1973 became the first Western tattooer to study under a traditional Japanese master, the prodigious Horihide, in Gifu City. Dressed in a green checked shirt, khakis and a pair of laceless mint-green sneakers bearing the Ed Hardy signature and his take on Tex Avery's 1940s slobbering wolf, Hardy recalled his colorful history the other day at Tattoo City.

"Aesthetically, it looks good. I'm not ashamed of the stuff," Hardy tells. He initially partnered with the fashion firm KU USA. Audigier flipped when he saw Hardy's work and made a deal with KU to market it. Hardy knew nothing about Audigier until he looked him up on Google and read about a party he'd hosted "in some secret location with Puff Daddy and all these people." He called one of his partners and said, "This guy is at ground zero of everything that's wrong with contemporary civilization. However, if he wants to make a lot of money with my art, and it's not going to be overtly negative, then what the hell."

The cash flow has given Hardy more time to spend with his wife, Francesca Passalacqua, and their boxer, Ruby, and concentrate on his painting. He does the occasional small souvenir tattoo -- they normally cost $500 to $1,000 -- but "I don't have to tattoo much anymore," Hardy said. "I put in my 40 years tattooing."

He helped transform the medium, developing elaborately designed and colored customized tattoos that usually took weeks. He inspired young tattooers from Australia to Europe, many of whom came to San Francisco to get a Hardy in their skin.