An Anchor and a Cross

Ididn’t​ plan my first tattoo. A few weeks after my mother died, I was in Mexico City in a bar owned by a female mezcal maker with whom I was having an ill-advised fling. There were only a few people there, including the tattoo artist from the studio upstairs. He had his kit with him, and as the evening wore on, and the mezcal continued to flow, people began inking ‘Oaxaca’ on one another. I paused for a moment when it came to my turn. The only thing I could imagine tattooed on my arm was the Spanish phrase my mother – once a Spanish teacher – had used the last time I spoke to her in the hospice. When I woke the next morning with the words lo mejor inscribed on my left forearm, I knew she would have hated it.

It was long believed that tattooing originated in ancient Egypt. In 1891, several tattooed mummies of women, dating from around 2000 BCE, were found at Deir el-Bahari near Luxor. Scholars assumed they were ‘dancing girls’ and the description stuck: as late as 1948 the Egyptologist Louis Keimer described them as ‘prostitutes of dubious morality’. It was only in the 1980s that researchers established that the lattice-work designs on the women’s stomachs were probably religious fertility symbols, designed to ensure protection in childbirth. Other examples of early tattooing had by this time been found across Eurasia. In 1991, the ice-preserved remains of a man who died around 3250 bce surfaced in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Italy and Austria. There were sixty tattoos – mostly dots and small crosses – on his lower spine, right knee and ankle joints, as though they had been intended to alleviate pain. In the permafrost of the Altai Mountains in Siberia, the remains of Scythian nomadic warriors were found bearing elaborate tattoos of animals and mythical creatures.

Matt Lodder’s Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art focuses on the history of tattooing in the West. His story begins in the 18th century, by which time tattooing had become an established commercial activity in the Middle East. Images of the crucified Christ or the skull of Adam were popular souvenirs among European pilgrims returning from the Holy Land. In 1658, the French pilgrim Jean de Thévenot described Christian tattooists in Jerusalem using wooden blocks to stamp religious symbols – often crosses – onto the skin of visitors before pricking in the ink:

They have several wooden moulds, of which you may choose that which pleases you best, then they fill it with coal dust, and apply it to your arm, so that they leave upon the same the mark of what is cut in the mould; after that, with the left hand they take hold of your arm and stretch the skin of it, and in the right hand they have a little cane with two needles fastened in it, which from time to time they dip into ink, mingled with ox’s gall, and prick your arm all along the lines that are marked by the wooden mould.

In the late 1760s and early 1770s, the Pacific voyages of James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, among others, introduced Europeans to the tattooing traditions of the Polynesian islands; the word ‘tattoo’ itself derives from the Tahitian tatau – to mark or strike the skin. Sydney Parkinson, Cook’s draughtsman, and the botanist Joseph Banks, who served as Cook’s scientific officer, were both tattooed during their travels, as were members of the mutinous crew of William Bligh’s HMS Bounty, who spent five months in Tahiti in 1789.

In 1813, after visiting the Marquesas Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean, the German naturalist Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff wrote:

It is undoubtedly very striking that nations perfectly remote from each other, who have no means of intercourse whatsoever … should yet all be agreed in this practice. Among Europeans, that is to say pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre, and the sailors of almost all the nations of Europe … among the nations of both the northern and southern hemispheres, both of the east and the west, in the old and the new world, are to be found traces of this custom; in some places more, in some places less, but among all and in a certain degree.

Others did not share his sense of wonder. In 1835, the American sailor William Torrey was shipwrecked in the Marquesas, where he claimed to have been captured by ‘cannibals’ and forcibly tattooed. He published an account of his experience in Torrey’s Narrative: or, The Life and Adventures of William Torrey (1848). In 19th-century captivity narratives such as Torrey’s, Lodder writes, tattoos ‘serve as indications of “savagery”’.

As the practice became more widespread, tattooing became a marker of class and character. Many references to tattoos survive in administrative and disciplinary records – dockworker registers, criminal reports and newspaper notices seeking runaway servants in the colonies. In 1766, the Pennsylvania Gazette offered a reward for a 21-year-old Irishman, Francis Power, who had escaped from his employers. The men to whom he was indentured, Thomas Barnsley and Herman Vansant, described him as ‘a great lover of strong drink … marked with Indian ink or gunpowder on both arms’ and ‘under his shirt with the figure of our Saviour crucified’. ‘The upper part of his right thumb,’ they noted, ‘has the date of the year 1761 on it.’ In 1797, a man called Thomas Maley was convicted in London of high treason and piracy; his criminal record listed several tattoos, including a pierced heart, a crucifix and a mermaid. Lodder also cites the case of Miles Confrey, a tailor who was found guilty of theft in 1854, and escaped from a prison ship in London before it set sail for Australia. A large sketch of Confrey appeared in Punch magazine, with his tattoos – a crucifix, ship motifs and what may have been a scene of armed robbery – prominently displayed.

The first person in the West who can be described as a professional tattoo artist was Martin Hildebrandt, a German émigré who settled in 19th-century Manhattan. The New York Directory for 1859 lists Hildebrandt’s tattoo studio alongside the city’s grocers, carpenters and labourers. He had learned his craft from another sailor while serving in the US navy in the 1840s, before opening his own shop in what Lodder describes as ‘a notoriously insalubrious boarding and drinking house in a violent, pier-side neighbourhood known as Slaughterhouse Point’.

The expansion of New York Harbour provided Hildebrandt with plenty of custom, but it was the influence of Japan that enabled his tattoo business to thrive. Hildebrandt claimed to have been aboard one of the American ships that, in 1853, forced Japan to open its ports to the outside world. An obsession with Japanese culture soon followed and, Lodder suggests, ‘the extensive, elaborate tattoos worn by actors, mailmen, firemen and others’ were particularly striking to Western eyes, being ‘far removed from the familiar European tattoos in both scope and aesthetic execution’. The fascination worked both ways. A colour woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshimori from 1860 depicts two (rather gormless-looking) Westerners encountering two Japanese men, one of whom displays a vivid canvas of blue and red ink on his back.

By the late 19th century, it was clear that tattoos were no longer confined to the lower classes. Hildebrandt boasted of having ‘many highly respectable gentlemen’ among his clientele. His main rival throughout the 1880s was Edwin Thomas, who ran a studio on the Lower East Side and advertised a refined tattooing service for ‘elderly and well-to-do merchants and ladies in silk attire’. Lodder relates the case of the Tichborne claimant, which was avidly followed on both sides of the Atlantic. Roger Tichborne, a young British aristocrat, was shipwrecked off the coast of Brazil in 1854. His mother, convinced that her son was still alive, launched a campaign to find him. Some years later, an imposter – in reality a butcher’s son from Wapping – came forward claiming to be the missing man. When he took the Tichborne family to court, it emerged that the real Roger had been ‘marked like a common sailor’, with his initials, a heart, an anchor and a cross tattooed on his arms while he was at public school. The imposter, who had no such identifying marks, was charged with perjury. A decade later, in 1881, Prince George (the future King George V) and his brother Prince Albert Victor were tattooed during a visit to Japan: George chose a dragon, Albert Victor a stork.

Lodder identifies Sutherland Macdonald, born in Leeds in 1860, as the first professional tattoo artist in Britain. By 1894, Macdonald was working from a studio in the basement of the Turkish Baths on Jermyn Street. The space, Lodder writes, was ‘sumptuously outfitted, much as a Japanese studio might have been, with luxurious cushions and a divan, with cigarettes and drinks made available for clients’. His customers included educated and wealthy men such as the barrister Reginald Loyd, later land tax commissioner for Berkshire, whose arms and torso Macdonald covered with birds, snakes, dragons and other mythical creatures. Another client was the Hon. George Edwardes, the son of an MP. In a photograph reproduced in the book, Edwardes poses with a cigarette in his mouth, his arms crossed defiantly over his chest. His tattoos include a catfish copied directly from a Hokusai print, together with a snake, lobster and crab. An image of an Indigenous American on horseback adorns his sternum.

Most of these tattoos were easily concealed from public view. In 1926, Vanity Fair reported that ‘tattooing has passed from the savage to the sailor, from the sailor to the landsman, and is now to be found beneath many a tailored shirt.’ But fashions change. The vogue for shorter skirts in the 1930s had the unintended consequence of revealing tattoos on older women, some of which had been acquired decades earlier and were never intended to be seen. In 1938, Lady Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, marchioness of Londonderry, caused a stir when she appeared at a fashion show with a dragon tattoo, which she’d had done in Japan in 1904, visible through her sheer stockings.

By this time, the tattoo artist’s job had been made considerably easier thanks to the invention of the electric tattoo machine, a device patented in 1891 by Samuel O’Reilly, who had learned his craft in New York, possibly under Hildebrandt. He had the ingenious idea of attaching a needle to one of Thomas Edison’s electric pens. The machine used in modern tattoo parlours may be more precise and a great deal quieter, but the essential operation hasn’t changed: a needle driven rapidly up and down by electric power.

Lodder points out that commercial tattooists have mostly been, and still tend to be, heterosexual men. Throughout his book, he is careful to note practitioners who defied the norm. Among them was Mildred Hull, the most prominent female tattoo artist of the 1940s, who had a studio on the Bowery in New York. She had taken up tattooing at the suggestion of a boyfriend (he had noticed her skill with an embroidery needle) and managed to distinguish herself from her older male competitors, whom she dismissed as ‘has-beens’ unable to expand their repertoire of images. She also maintained strict professional standards, refusing to tattoo minors and admonishing clients not to be ‘wise guys’. Lodder also discusses Jessie Knight, born in South London, who took over her father’s tattooing business in 1927. In 1955, she was runner-up in the Champion Tattooer of All England competition for a full backpiece depicting a Highland fling.

The notion of the tattoo as something concealed – waiting to be uncovered – lends it an erotic quality. The association with secrecy helps to explain why tattooing became linked with queer communities – people accustomed to leading double lives and seeking out signs from fellow travellers. Hans Rudolf (‘Rudi’) Inhelder, a Swiss physicist who spent time in London and Bristol in the early 1950s, became involved in a network of British tattoo clubs before taking his expertise to New York. He was much in demand within the Cold War defence industry. Although tattooing was banned in New York in 1961 following an outbreak of hepatitis, Inhelder went on to found the Tattoo Club of America in 1963. He missed, as Lodder writes, ‘the camaraderie … of tattooers and tattooed people he had found in London’. It was also a way to meet people at a time when coming out could ruin one’s career (queer men were said to be more susceptible to communism).

One member of Inhelder’s club was Phil Sparrow, born Samuel Steward. A professor of literature at Washington State, he had lost his academic post in 1936 after publishing Angels on the Bough, a novel deemed too sexually explicit – though it earned him the admiration of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. He assisted Alfred Kinsey with research for the follow-up to Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and wrote a column – with ‘barely coded allusions to homosexual promiscuity’ – in the Illinois Dental Journal. After his dismissal from academia, Steward reinvented himself as a tattoo artist and changed his name, motivated in part, it seems, by what Lodder describes as his ‘grand sexual appetite’:

Over the course of his life, he extensively documented his thousands of sexual encounters in a self-declared Stud File … He even tattooed a handy series of measurement marks on his forearm in order to accurately record the particular prowess of each of his partners for posterity … ‘I wanted freedom,’ he described later. ‘[Tattooing] was a grand new way to feast the eyes on male beauty … one could now touch the skin which you could only look at in the classroom – the arms, the legs, the chest – and there would be no one to raise an eyebrow, and you could in the right instances take a young man to the cot in the back room.’

Sparrow went on to become the main tattoo artist for the Hells Angels in California. On one occasion, he was reportedly forced to black-out a Hells Angels tattoo acquired by a non-member, while a group of Angels held the man down.

In Britain in the 1970s, a former art teacher called Alan Oversby began working as a tattooist under the pseudonym ‘Mr Sebastian’. His ‘flashes’ – repeatable designs displayed on studio walls – included images of circus strongmen and of sadomasochistic gay sex. Mr Sebastian also did body piercing, and in the late 1980s he was caught up in Operation Spanner, a police crackdown on gay BDSM communities that led to the arrest of sixteen men. He received a suspended prison sentence for what Lodder describes as ‘having carried out consensual genital piercing on a boyfriend’.

Lodder documents the lives of these gay men but doesn’t examine what drew them to tattooing. Altering the body can be a means of reclaiming it, of asserting ownership over something society seeks to regulate. A tattoo can function in many ways: as a message for all to see or as a discreet code recognisable only to those who know its meaning. It can be an act of defiance as well as solidarity. I remember as a young child walking in a London park with my mother when an androgynous person with a shaved head and tattooed arms jogged past us. ‘Why do they need to make it so obvious?’ my mother said. I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, but I do now.