Freddy Negrete grew up in East Los Angeles, and was born into the world of prison tattooing.

When he was a baby, his father, Fernando Negrete — a zoot-suit-wearing pachuco — was convicted of armed robbery after holding up a train station and sent to San Quentin, where he picked up the trade.

According to his book, Freddy was 2½ when his mother, Jacqueline Stearns, was charged with manslaughter after a zip gun in her hand went off at a party, killing another woman.

Freddy is still not sure how long she spent in prison. But with both parents gone, he and his older sister Vicky became wards of the state. At 11, he ran away from his foster home and landed in youth detention. From there, he joined a gang and graduated to more serious crimes.

Prison, he found over the next several years, had its minuses and its pluses. On one hand, he said, “I was exposed to the heroin culture.” On the other, he became the Chicano tattoo world’s first bona fide star.

In 1977, he was out on parole and got a job at Good Time Charlie’s Tattooland, then in East Los Angeles. His boss there was Ed Hardy, the man who helped introduce North America to Japanese tattooing and later licensed his tattoo designs to clothing manufacturers.

According to Mr. Hardy, the shop was located then in the middle of gang territory. “So you had to pay the people who controlled the neighborhood,” he said recently.