Inked and Exiled: How Tattoo Culture Became Synonymous with Criminals in Britain
It dates back to the 18th century, when British convicts were deported around the world in theirs tens of thousands.
Tattoos have long been associated with criminality in certain parts of the world. This was true for Ancient Greece and Rome, and through most of ancient Chinese and Japanese history. But in the West, from the Middle Ages through to the late modern period, body art had mostly disappeared for over a millennia. It’s apparently only after “Frobisher’s Inuits piqued a new interest in body art both in Britain and Europe in the 16th Century” that criminals “rediscovered” tattoos.
“So ubiquitous did tattooing become throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries in Britain that tattoos even came up in court cases. In January 1739, the London Evening Post reported the conviction of a 15-year-old thief whose trial found him to have an especially violent tattoo across his chest,” according to BBC Future.
They say timing is everything, and it seems tattoos found criminals at exactly the point in history when there had never been more of them: the industrial revolution. Britain was at the centre of the world’s technological advances which made a lot of people rich — but many others worse off. “The Industrial Revolution created a generation of urban poor — people who moved from farms to overcrowded cities with no work and money. Crime soared in these squalid Dickensian conditions, as many families were forced to steal to survive,” according to Culture Trip.
Without proper prisons to deal with the rise in crime and exploding population, transporting criminals became the new, preferred penalty. “Between 1718 and 1775, over 52,000 convicts were transported from the British Isles to America, mainly to Maryland and Virginia, to be sold as slaves to the highest bidder,” according to The History Press. However after the American War of Independence, the British had to find a new dumping ground for their so-called “offensive rubbish” – and Sir Banks recommended Australia, based on his voyage with Captain Cook.
“From 1787 to 1857, 162,000 British convicts were transported to Australia. Seven out of eight of these were males; some were as young as nine or ten; some were over eighty,” according to the UK’s National Archives. Transporting that many people required a lot of paperwork, and recording the details of people’s tattoos proved to be a useful way of keeping track of them.
“In the absence of photography, colonial clerks crafted highly detailed physical descriptions of each convict upon their arrival. In fact, tattoos made these clerks’ jobs easier as they provided a unique characteristic which would set the prisoner apart,” writes Simon Barnard in Convict Tattoos; Marked Men and Women of Australia.
The convicts knew their tattoos gave the authorities greater control over them — yet they still carried out the practice. “While tattoos can be interpreted as expressions of convicts’ individuality and aspirations, official practices of recording tattoos when documenting their physical characteristics can be seen as a form of state control,” according to The Digital Panopticon.
So why would they willingly participate in something that would be used against them? It’s argued this is proof of a more “defiant, criminal sub-culture”. But perhaps, on a more human level, it shows the deeper need for identity and meaning outweighed the safety of greater anonymity.
“In a world of colonial authority and uniformity, tattoos probably provided a small means for convicts to assert their individuality,” according to the Royal Australian Historical Society.
Since stealing a loaf of bread was enough to get an “eight-month boat trip 10,000 miles across the sea”, everything tattoos represented would have likely appealed to this group. Being removed from their homeland and treated like a commodity, tattoos gave people a sense of identity. They may have had rebellious appeal – re-appropriating something shameful and making it a badge of honour. Tattoos may have made people feel more powerful; a way to show bravery and strength. And considering these people faced a journey they might not survive – and a life of hardship if they did – they may have embraced tattoos as talismans to bring them good luck.
According to one study, the underlying desire beneath many convict tattoos was “to remember. To remember family and friends, to recall lovers and experiences, wins and losses. And, ultimately, to maintain their own identity and to remember who they were themselves, beyond their chains,” according to the Royal Australian Historical Society.
Despite the public perception at the time that tattoos symbolised “persons of bad repute” who used tattoos to mark themselves “like savages”, studies conducted since, looking at the database of records from 58,002 Victorian convicts, proves this wasn’t the case. The most popular types of tattoos for convicts were naval designs, religious motifs, romantic tattoos or affirmations of love, statements of national identity and nature motifs.
“Tattooing increased significantly in Britain and Australia in the nineteenth century, when a growing number of criminal convicts acquired tattoos. Their many meanings include expressions of love, hope, pain, defiance, fraternity and religious commitment, and aspirations to be fashionable,” according to The Digital Panopticon.
According to Barnard, the author of Convict Tattoos, “Men were more heavily tattooed than women, and with a greater array of imagery. Most tattooed female convicts were tattooed with initials. Women were more likely to be tattooed in less visible areas such as the shoulder or leg, but, like men, most were tattooed on their forearms. The left arm was more popular than the right, which suggests that many tattoos were self-administered.”
“Although we can’t be sure, it is likely that most (tattoos) were acquired during the long voyage. The fact that many had their year of conviction or transportation tattooed on their skin reflects recognition of the fact that their forcible removal halfway around the world, probably never to return to Britain, was a life-changing event,” he adds.
Public support for transporting convicts waned around the mid-19th century. By this point, law-abiding citizens were actually paying for the opportunity to start a new life in Australia, so it was hard to justify why criminals would get free passage.
“Removing criminals to another land did not seem to have had any effect on the crime-rate,” according to the UK’s National Archives. “Prisons were now considered a better method of punishing and/or reforming criminals and many new ones were being built. Most of all, Australians began to object strongly to their country being used as a dumping-ground for Britain’s criminals.”
Journey through tattoo history at NAAMA’s Medium — our space to explore the ever-changing human relationship to tattoos, chronicle their complex history, and celebrate the empowering future of body art evolution.
