Ed Hardy charged three cents for his first tattoos. He was 10 years old, drawing pictures on his friends, and none of them paid. Today, many decades later, he is renowned for elevating the practice of tattooing to an art form. Hardy takes inspiration from America’s history of tattooing and from the stylized woodblock prints and paintings of Japan’s ukiyo-e, a genre of the 17th to 19th centuries. This retrospective—the first time a museum is honoring Hardy—brings this outsider artist into the fold. —J.V.