You can tell a lot about a tattoo shop by who paints the flash on the walls. At Ohana Tattoo Company in Waikiki, a lot of it has Dustin Gormley's hand on it — the bold black keylines, the saturated red-yellow-green palette, the kind of drawing that holds up across the room and across forty years of healed skin. Dustin is one of the artists on the bench at Ohana, and he's also something more uncommon in this craft: a working tattooer who has put his flash into actual books, twice, and offers them to the rest of the tattoo world.

Painting flash like it's the whole point

If you've spent any time around tattoo shops you know that there are two kinds of artists — the ones who consider flash a means to an end (something to fill walls until a custom appointment walks in), and the ones who treat flash like its own art form, where a single page of seven drawings has to read across the room, stand on its own as a composition, and still translate cleanly to skin. Dustin is the second kind. Anybody who has stood at the Ohana flash wall and seen the lucky cats and pineapple skulls and traditional roses he's painted — the kind of pieces where the drawing alone makes you stop walking — knows what we're talking about.

Painting flash is also a discipline. Most of what gets called "flash" online today is digital art exported from an iPad. Dustin still pulls out the brush — gouache on Bristol, or watercolor on the heavier paper Sailor Jerry used to favor — and lets the medium do its share of the talking. That's why his sheets, when they're posted on his @dustingormley Instagram, get reposted by tattooers who aren't even in Hawaii. The drawings carry weight that translates through a phone screen.

The books — actual books, on actual Amazon shelves

Most tattooers, if they put flash out at all, sell it as a PDF on Gumroad or a one-off zine they hand to friends. Dustin chose the harder path: real perfect-bound paperbacks, printed and listed on Amazon, anybody in any state or any country can buy a copy. Two volumes are out so far, and a third is in his sketchbook.

Turtles n' Stuff: A Collection of Hawaii-Themed Tattoo Flash Designs and Coloring Book

120 pages. Honu, plumeria, palms, tiki, hula, sharks, the whole Hawaii visual vocabulary distilled into a flash collection that doubles as an adult coloring book. The duality is the genius: it lives on a tattoo shop counter as a reference book and in a Waikiki tourist's beach bag as a way to take a piece of Hawaii home that isn't a t-shirt. ISBN 9798288102394, paperback, $19.99.

Buy Turtles n' Stuff on Amazon →

Lucky Roll: A Game of Chance & Traditional Tattoo Flash

204 pages. Released April 12, 2026. This one is the shop companion — a book deliberately designed to live at a tattoo counter. An indecisive walk-in client (and Waikiki has plenty of those, on vacation, between flights, two drinks in) picks up the book, rolls a pair of dice, and the dice choose the piece. The cover alone — cosmic gold ink on deep navy, two dancing dice, twin twirling vines — tells you Dustin took the rebrand idea and ran with it before the rest of his catalog had caught up. $18.99.

Buy Lucky Roll on Amazon →

For the catalog as it grows, follow his Amazon author page. Anything new ships there first.

Art as a whole — beyond the shop, beyond the page

Dustin's own bio describes him, in his own words, as "a tattoo artist, painter, and coffee enthusiast based in Honolulu, Hawaii… exploring consciousness, and turning years of tattoo experience into creative resources for artists and collectors alike." That line — exploring consciousness — is the seed of something he's quietly building toward. Anyone who's seen the new dustingormley.com with its cosmic monogram and Intuition · Energy · Transformation tagline knows the next chapter is on its way: ritualized, intentional tattoo work — bold traditional iconography channeled through sacred geometry, mandala work, and the quieter side of the practice.

He keeps the workbook open on what tattooing actually is. Not the iPad-flash factory version. Not the celebrity-influencer version. The version where somebody sits in a chair, gets marked with a symbol that means something specific to them, and walks out with it on their body for the rest of their life. Dustin treats that transaction like the ceremony it is — and he's writing it down so the next generation of artists has reference material that doesn't pretend the craft started in 2018.

Where to find him, what to read, what to buy

  • Tattoo with Dustin — at Ohana Tattoo Company, 339 Saratoga Rd, Waikiki. Text (808) 582-8081. Walk-ins welcome.
  • Books on Amazon:
  • Personal site: dustingormley.com — portfolio, shop section with the books, intake form, and the new Intuition · Energy · Transformation direction.
  • Instagram: @dustingormley — flash drops, sketchbook pages, behind-the-station moments.
  • Original paintings & one-off flash: not in the books — text Dustin direct or DM Instagram if you want something off the wall.

Why this matters for the Waikiki tattoo scene

We started the Waikiki Tattoo Network as a way to point visitors and locals at the real artists — the working ones who paint their own flash, run their own benches, and care about what gets put on people's skin. Dustin is exactly that. He's also one of the only artists in the network publishing books. Buy them. Bring them home. Put them on the shop counter at your own studio. It's the kind of cross-pollination this craft needs more of — Hawaii-rooted iconography ending up on tattoo benches in Chicago, Stuttgart, Auckland. That's the long game. That's how a Hawaii artist keeps Hawaii moving outward.

"Anybody who paints their own flash and ships it as a book — buy the book. That's how the craft stays the craft." — Kanoa Wilson, TNT Tattoo