The summer after graduating from Newport Harbor High School, aspiring artist Don Ed Hardy had a booth at the Laguna Beach Sawdust Festival. It's safe to say that the wares he exhibitedthere didn't raise an eyebrow.

"It was around 1962, and the prevailing aesthetic was like really pleasant seascapes and clowns," recalled Hardy, who was raised in Corona del Mar.

Such pleasantries still dominate the festival. Hardy, however, now favors bloody daggers, venomous snakes and Stinky the skunk.

Hardy is a tattoo artist, who designs and applies the indelible designs, as well as a trained contemporary artist. His current project is to show how tattoos and more traditional artworks fit together in "Eye Tattooed America," a traveling group exhibition at Laguna Art Museum that Hardy curated.

"It's great to see this wild art form I've embraced kind of coming back to the old stomping grounds," said Hardy, whose works are among those displayed. "It'll be fun to see what sort of reaction it gets from people used to a more staid kind of art."

If another Laguna Museum exhibit exploring the impact of lowbrow culture on highbrow art is any indication, public reaction could be gonzo. "Kustom Kulture," the 1993 show linking custom cars, hot rods, raunchy comics and contemporary art, scored as one of the 75-year-old institution's most popular efforts ever.

"Eye Tattooed America" includes an in-your-face profusion of flash--designs of the images, such as snarling panthers, skulls, roses, hearts and U.S. Navy insignias, worn by the tattooed.

Eye-popping photographs show people vividly tattooed from bald head and bare butt to toe. But the exhibit's thrust is how tattoo art has left its mark on fine art, represented here by paintings, sculpture and etchings.

There are about 150 pieces, dating from the 1930s through the '90s. About 30 artists contributed works, including tattoo artist "Sailor Jerry" Collins, who was Hardy's mentor. There are also artists who, like Hardy, straddle both worlds and leading fine artists who have at one time or another found inspiration, imagery or both from the phenomenon of flesh branding. Among them are Ed Paschke, Terry Allen, Tony Fitzpatrick, Karen Carson, Manuel Ocampo, John Altoon and Masami Teraoka.

A bloody dagger protrudes from an envelope carried aloft by a blindfolded bird in Hardy's enigmatic, foreboding watercolor "Bad News (Tweeter Is Sick)" (1992). The disconcerting "Painted Lady" (1971), an oil painting by Paschke, perhaps Chicago's best-known artist, depicts a 1940s-era pinup beauty covered in tattoos, her sweetly smiling face included.