Tattoo shops have come and gone in Seabrook, but Jim’s Tattoo Studio has been a mainstay on Route 1 for the last 40 years.

Jim Boyd was 22 when he got his first tattoo, a bird on his arm, at a fair in Rochester. He liked drawing, and he decided then he would try tattooing professionally. He and a partner started the shop at the current Jim’s Tattoo location the next year in 1977, the studio at that time unnamed. People referred to it as “star tattoo,” he said, because the building had a picture of a star on the side. After a year, he bought his partner out of the business, becoming the sole owner.

Jim’s Tattoo was the only tattoo shop in the area when it opened. The nearest was in Nashua, Benoit said, so people closer to Seabrook were excited to get their tattoos at Jim’s Tattoo. At that time in the late 1970s, those clients were mostly motorcycle riders, but Boyd said that changed in the 1980s and early 1990s. He said the birth of music videos made many want to look like rock stars, and tattoos became more mainstream. Pete LeClair recalled first joining Jim’s Tattoo about a year after Boyd opened. The studio offered a much simpler service. Customers picked from just 25 pictures they could have stenciled on their skin. Today, the walls are lined with hundreds of pictures of tattoo options.

The tattoo industry was also much less regulated then, he said. Unlike today, artists needed no license, and LeClair said he and other artists never used simple health precautions like wearing gloves.

“You get the blood on you, you didn’t worry about it,” LeClair said. “All you worried about was how you were going to clean it off.”

Now, artists wear powdered gloves, and all instruments are autoclaved, LeClair said, just like medical instruments.

LeClair remembered one instance when he refused to give a tattoo to a customer. A group of about 20 bike riders rode up to the shop, and one asked for the Harley-Davidson logo to be tattooed across his forehead.

“I told him, no, I’m not doing it. He was not in his right mind,” said LeClair. “He got to the point where he wanted to punch me. His friends got him out of there.”

The next day, the same biker rode up again and handed him a bottle of Crown Royal to thank him for not letting him permanently tattoo his face.

Boyd said confrontations and antics like that were rare at the shop, though he said in the 1980s a customer once rolled a Molotov cocktail — in this instance, an oil can full of gas on fire — at the shop from across the parking lot. Someone kicked it away, preventing damage to the shop.