From UFO Encounters to Tattoo Flash: Inside the Strange World of Weird Tales!

Some auctions are built around a single collecting category. Others are memorable precisely because they refuse to stay in one lane. On October 1, 2026, Potter & Potter Auctions will present Weird Tales! UFOs, Curiosities and Tattoos live on Bidsquare, bringing together 569 lots that move between outsider art, tattoo history, medical curiosities, UFO material, and objects that are simply difficult to categorize.

It is an auction for collectors who are drawn to things with stories attached to them, the strange, the highly personal, the historically specific, and sometimes the slightly unsettling. Among the highlights are paintings documenting alleged extraterrestrial encounters, an entire drawer of antique prosthetic eyes, and tattoo designs that trace different chapters in the history of the medium.

David Huggins, Hairy Creature in Shower (Lot 534)
Few works capture the spirit of Weird Tales! quite as directly as David Huggins’ Hairy Creature in Shower, an unsigned oil on canvas dating to around 2010. Huggins, a New Jersey artist, has used painting to chronicle what he describes as a lifetime of encounters with extraterrestrial beings. His narratives include extraordinary claims of alien contact, and his paintings transform those experiences into scenes that can feel simultaneously matter-of-fact and surreal. 

Measuring 22 by 19 inches, Hairy Creature in Shower turns an everyday domestic setting into something decidedly stranger. The work is estimated at $4,000–$6,000, placing it among the more substantial individual highlights in the sale. For collectors interested in outsider and self-taught art, UFO culture, or deeply personal visual storytelling, Huggins’ work occupies an unusual space where autobiography, belief, and image-making overlap.

A Drawer Full of Eyes (Lot 10)
There are curiosities, and then there is a wooden drawer containing 171 early 20th-century prosthetic glass eyes.

German in origin, the collection consists of brown blown-glass eyes individually arranged within a gridded wooden drawer. The case measures approximately 13 by 26¼ inches, while each eye is roughly 1½ by 1 inch. The backs retain the open tube ends created during the glassblowing process, offering a reminder that these were handmade functional objects rather than mass-produced novelties. 

Estimated at $1,000–$2,000, the group has an undeniable visual impact. Seen together, the eyes become almost sculptural: repetitive but subtly varied, clinical yet strangely expressive. It is the kind of object that fits equally well into collections devoted to medical history, antique scientific material, or the broader world of oddities and curiosities.

Don Nolan’s Hand-Colored Tattoo Flash (Lot 269)
The auction also offers an impressive group of material devoted to tattoo history, including a 1980 hand-colored original flash sheet by Don Nolan.

Executed in ink and watercolor, the 11-by-14-inch sheet features six designs inspired by traditional Japanese imagery. The work is signed at the lower right and dedicated to “Joey V,” giving the piece an especially personal connection to the tattoo culture from which it emerged. 

Estimated at $1,000–$2,000, Nolan’s flash sheet demonstrates how tattoo designs can function as artworks in their own right. Removed from the walls of a tattoo shop and viewed decades later, flash offers a record of both individual artistic style and the visual language circulating through tattoo culture at a particular moment in time.

Percy Waters and the Blueprint of American Tattooing (Lot 186)
Moving further back in tattoo history, a circa-1920s blueprint tattoo flash sheet by Percy Waters features an eagle, cowgirls, and electric tattooing imagery. Signed and inscribed in the plate, the blueprint measures 24 by 18 inches and is estimated at $1,000–$2,000. 

Waters was an important figure in American tattooing. Potter & Potter notes that he developed an adjustable two-coil electromagnetic tattoo machine in 1929, operated a successful tattoo supply business, and sold “Tattoo Starter Packs” that helped disseminate the tools and imagery of the trade. 

That history gives the blueprint significance beyond its striking blue-and-white appearance. It is both a piece of graphic art and a document from an era when modern American tattoo culture was still taking shape.

Collecting the Unconventional
What makes Weird Tales! so entertaining is the way seemingly unrelated objects begin to speak to one another. A painting of an alleged extraterrestrial encounter, a drawer of prosthetic eyes, and tattoo flash from different generations all share a fascination with the body, identity, belief, and the ways people record their experiences.

For collectors who prefer the unexpected, Potter & Potter Auctions’ Weird Tales! UFOs, Curiosities and Tattoos offers plenty to explore. The live auction begins October 1 on Bidsquare.com, inviting bidders to venture well beyond the conventional collecting categories—and perhaps come away with something they never expected to want.