Nothing to do but start over

Flash is not made to be preserved. It is made to be used - painted, stacked in a drawer, pulled out for a client on a Tuesday afternoon, traced over until the paper wears thin. That is the entire point of it. That is what Jeff and so many tattoo artists love about it.


On the morning of October 19, 2016, a natural gas explosion destroyed the building that housed Art Work Rebels Tattoo Studio on NW 23rd Avenue in Portland. Somewhere in the rubble was a metal flat file. Inside it, years of handpainted flash, 11 x 14-inch sheets of watercolor board covered in skulls and pinup girls, snakes and skeletons, designs traced and re-traced in the tradition of the craft. The site was sealed due to asbestos. Nothing was recovered.


What remained were photographs. Not careful scans — Jeff had stopped sending his work out to be professionally documented, feeling he was being too precious with paintings that were always meant to be working tools. What survived was casual, imperfect, and entirely his own: handheld shots taken by an artist who never imagined they would one day be the only record.


Everything That Burned is built from those photographs. It is the complete archive of Jeff's pre-explosion flash, arranged in reverse chronological order from the last sheet he painted to the first. It does not pretend to be more than it is — not a polished retrospective, but a document of work that lived in a shop, on a wall, in a drawer, in the hands of someone who spent years making it and one morning lost all of it. The photographs are imperfect. The loss was total. The book is what remains.

EVERYTHING THAT BURNED

FEATURED ARTIST

JEFF P

Jeff is a Portland-based tattooer whose practice is rooted in traditional flash handprinted on watercolor board, hung in the shop, designed to be re-traced in the way flash has always moved through the trade. His imagery draws from the full vocabulary of the form: skulls and pinup girls, snakes and botanical motifs, cartoon characters and quietly iconic designs that feel as though they have always existed.

What defines his relationship to flash is not technical fluency alone but genuine affection for the medium - for the ritual of starting a new sheet, for the stack of finished work in the drawer, for the satisfaction of making something new from a design that has been rendered hundreds of times before. That love is present throughout this book, in the work and in the making of it.

Everything That Burned is the first and only comprehensive document of his pre-2016 work. A body of flash that now only exists solely within these pages.

TAKE A LOOK INSIDE

What the fire could not take

What defines his relationship to flash is not technical fluency alone but genuine affection for the medium — for the ritual of starting a new sheet, for the stack of finished work in the drawer, for the satisfaction of making something new from a design that has been rendered hundreds of times before. That love is present throughout this book, in the work and in the making of it.

The only surviving record of this work

Every image in this book is a photograph of a painting that no longer exists. The originals were destroyed in the 2016 explosion and sealed under asbestos. This volume is not a companion to the work, it is the work, in the only form that remains.

Years of flash, from last to first

Arranged in reverse chronological order, the book spans the full arc of a body of work. How the imagery evolved, how the hand developed, and what stayed constant across years of working in a single medium.

Honest Photography, not studio documentation

The first half is shot by hand — Jeff's own photographs, taken before he began sending sheets out to be scanned. That decision gives this half a quality no studio session could replicate: the paintings as they actually lived, in working light, held by working hands.

A document of flash as a living practice

This is not a book about the explosion. It is a book about the work that existed before it. The loss gives it weight. The work gives it meaning.

Some records exist because someone planned them. this one exists by chance.

Flash is made to disappear — into skin, into the wear of years, into the ordinary entropy of a working shop. Jeff P. understood this and loved it anyway. He painted his sheets to be used, not saved. The drawer was for pulling out and putting back, not for preservation.

The explosion made this book necessary. It also made it irreplaceable. Everything That Burned is the complete record of a body of work that cannot be recovered in any other form — published by Afterlife Press in a limited edition that will not be reprinted. For those who understand what traditional flash means, and what it costs to lose it, this is the essential document.

About us

At Afterlife Press, we create books with intention — publications that honor the people, stories, and history behind tattooing. Every title we produce is crafted with uncompromising attention to detail, built in collaboration with world-class artists, and printed to last a lifetime. These are not disposable products or mass-market books; they’re artifacts meant to be collected, revisited, and preserved as part of tattoo culture’s evolving story.

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