04/28/2026
Franklin Paul Rogers was born on September 9, 1905 in Couches Creek, North Carolina. His father died when he was young and his family moved repeatedly between cotton mill towns. He started working in the mills at 13, years before child labor laws were enacted. In 1926, at 21, he got his first tattoo from Chet Cain. Two years later, in October 1928, he ordered his first tattoo kit by mail from E.J. Miller in Norfolk, Virginia and began tattooing.
In 1932 he joined the J.J. Page Show, then the John T. Rea Happyland Show, where he met and married Helen. For most of the next decade they worked the carnival circuit in the summers and returned to the mills in the winters. In 1942 he opened his first shop in Charleston, South Carolina. His best weekly pay from the mills had been $42. Tattooing brought him $150 to $200 a week. In 1945 he began a five-year association with Cap Coleman in Norfolk, Virginia, at the time one of the most respected tattooers in the country. After Norfolk shut down tattooing in 1950, Rogers continued working out of shops across the South and Mid-Atlantic, and co-founded the mail order supply company Spaulding and Rogers with Huck Spaulding.
By 1970 Rogers had settled in Jacksonville, Florida, where he built tattoo machines out of a business he called the Iron Factory. He referred to the machines as irons. In 1988 he suffered a stroke and never fully recovered. When the tattoo community learned of his condition, they produced a benefit flash book in 1989 to help cover his medical expenses. He died in 1990 at the age of 84, after 56 years in the trade, and left his entire collection to the Tattoo Archive.
