Phuc Tran is a writer, tattooer, classicist and educator. He was born in Sài Gòn Việt Nam. His family fled to America in 1975, and he grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Reared on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, John Hughes, Star Wars, Bones Brigade videos, and bootlegged cassettes of Minor Threat and TSOL, he graduated high school in 1991. Phuc majored in Classical Languages and Literature at Bard College, got his Master’s Degree at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then moved to New York City in 1997. There, he apprenticed to be a tattooer while teaching Latin during the day, and has been teaching and tattooing ever since.
Following in the footsteps of E.B. White (who was neither a tattooer nor Latin teacher), Phuc and his wife left the city and moved to Maine in 2003 (she’s an honest-to-goodness Mainer) where they opened their shop, Tsunami Tattoo.