Art school and traveling carnivals After working in Quebec for two months, Dietzel
hopped a train and moved to
New Haven, Connecticut. In New Haven, he took some art classes at
Yale University while working as a tattoo artist at night. He wanted to be a fine-art painter, but he could not afford to continue studying art at Yale, so he became a full-time tattoo artist instead.
Milwaukee In 1913, Dietzel arrived in
Milwaukee and found that nobody was tattooing there. He decided to stay and set up shop in an
arcade. Many of his customers were soldiers and sailors who served in
World War I and
World War II. He said that the
Navy was discouraging tattoos of naked women, so he was often asked to add clothes to existing tattoos. He became known as the region's leading tattoo artist. He developed a large quantity of
flash art — at one point, he said that he had developed more than 5,000 designs He was called the "Master in Milwaukee", "Master of Milwaukee", and "
Rembrandt of the rind". Dietzel also painted landscapes and birds, and he took classes at
Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. In February 1967, Thomas said that he and Dietzel had "covered more people for exhibition than any two people in the United States", but that few people wanted to become tattooed sideshow performers anymore; most of their recent customers were sailors or businessmen. Dietzel and Thomas continued to tattoo together until the Milwaukee city council banned tattooing on 1 July 1967. ==Personal life and death==