Owen Jensen

Life & Work

The Art of Owen Jensen

Owen Jensen grew up in Pleasant Grove, Utah, and as a young man walked twelve miles to Provo in 1911 to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. There he encountered his first tattooed performer—an experience that set the course of his life. By 1913 he received his first tattoo while traveling with the Lucky Bill Show, and within a few years he had assembled his own portable “trunk outfit” and begun tattooing across Colorado and Wyoming. Like many early American tattoo artists, Jensen entered the trade through the traveling show circuit, where circus routes doubled as the earliest distribution network for tattoo imagery in the western United States. 

Jensen served overseas during World War I, continuing to tattoo while in uniform—part of a long tradition linking military service and American tattoo culture. In 1923 he moved to Los Angeles and married Dainty Dotty Florence Jensen, the nationally known circus performer who later became a tattoo artist herself. Together they represent one of the clearest examples of how sideshow performance and professional tattooing overlapped during the early twentieth century. Their partnership helped carry tattoo practice from itinerant carnival routes into permanent West Coast shop environments during the interwar years.

Jensen was known not only for his tattooing but for his mechanical skill with early electric tattoo machines—an essential advantage in a period when artists often built, modified, and repaired their own equipment. His career traces a recognizable path through American tattoo history: Wild West show inspiration, carnival apprenticeship, military tattooing, and eventual settlement in Los Angeles as tattooing transitioned from traveling trade to storefront profession. He died in 1976 after being attacked and robbed, bringing a difficult end to a life that had begun with a twelve-mile walk to see a tattooed man—and never turning back.

Twelve miles to see a tattooed man at the Wild West Show. He never looked back.