“LA Originals” is part reminiscence and part reclamation. The documentary, streaming on Netflix, finds the filmmaker and photographer Estevan Oriol, who directed, revisiting his career and the career of his friend and collaborator Mark Machado, a tattoo artist to the stars who goes by the names Cartoon or Mr. Cartoon.

Both became instrumental figures in the Los Angeles hip-hop scene starting in the late 1980s and early ’90s, doing work that fused the mainstream (album covers, music videos) with the city’s Chicano art traditions, and also captured violence, poverty and addiction in parts of Los Angeles that in recent years have gentrified.

Although the film unfolds from an insider’s perspective (with an irritating tendency to drop one name after another), it is also a good introduction to the two artists. We learn how Cartoon, already recognized for his graffiti murals, turned to skin, and how Oriol, who shot tour footage of the rap groups Cypress Hill and House of Pain, came to know Cartoon and bring him customers. The pair worked together for years in the shadow of Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Oriol would film and photograph the many celebrities who visited the studio for inking.