Tatuaje

Pete Johnson, a Los Angeles retailer and collector, launched Tatuaje in 2003 with cigars rolled by Jose Pepin Garcia at El Rey de los Habanos in Miami. The pairing was influential well beyond its own sales: it introduced the Garcia family to the American market and helped establish the template of a small brand owner working with a specialist manufacturer rather than owning a factory.

Production later followed the Garcias to My Father Cigars in Esteli. The original Brown Label, sometimes called the Cabinet series, remains the core line, alongside Havana VI, the fuller Black Label, the Cojonu vitolas and Fausto. The annual Monster Series, a set of Halloween-timed limited editions each named for a horror figure, launched in 2008 with The Frank (a nod to Frankenstein) and ran through thirteen original characters before Johnson began revisiting the earliest blends under a Monster Series Redux sub-line starting in 2021 - modernized versions of the original recipes, released in the same chronological order. Each Monster traditionally ships in a coffin-shaped box of 13, numbered out of 666 and sold through a short list of lottery-selected retailers nicknamed the 'Unlucky 13,' with suggested retail kept near $13 a cigar. It remains among the most collected release programmes in the industry.

Johnson has kept the brand deliberately small and retailer-focused, with frequent shop-exclusive and regional releases. Tatuaje and My Father marked twenty years of collaboration with a joint release. Some early line dates are inconsistently reported, so this record is marked reported. Distribution is limited to the United States and a small number of export markets, and Johnson has also developed separate labels produced under the same manufacturing arrangement.