Michael Malone, a tattoo artist renowned among his peers for helping to popularize and standardize tattooing through the vivid images of dragons, daggers, cartoon characters and crests that he distributed to tattoo parlors around the world, died on April 17 at his home in Chicago. He was 64.

Mr. Malone committed suicide after a long illness, his business partner, Keith Underwood, said.

Mr. Malone, who assumed the pen name Rollo Banks early in his career, was noted for standardizing "the flash," the 11-by-17-inch posters on tattoo parlor walls that show up to a dozen images from which clients make their choices.

"What Rollo did was produce clean yet powerful tattoo designs and circulate them across the globe," said Chris Midkiff, editor of Tattoo Artist magazine. Before Mr. Malone, Mr. Midkiff said, "most tattoo shops hand-drew their own flash. Mostly it was bad drawing by people who weren't really artists."