This is how your mom wound up with that tramp stamp
Body ink’s unlikely journey from Polynesia to the sailor’s biceps to, well, everyone else
Now that at least 40 percent of American households boast at least one tattooed individual, it may be hard to believe that skin ink was once exclusively the province of the working class. The practice has since become so widespread as to be perfectly mainstream, and an armful of fresh ink can cost thousands of dollars.
But the journey of the tattoo from the sailor’s biceps to the hipster’s thigh hasn’t been a linear one. In fact, like hairstyles and footwear, tattoos have shifted between classes and social groups over the course of centuries, and their meanings have been various and even conflicting.
Because tattooing and other body modification practices have been discovered by archaeologists among the earliest human societies, they’ve often been regarded as “primitive.” Some types of tattoo — and techniques, like stick-and-poke — hark back specifically to ancient aesthetics. Tattoos as we’ve come to know them in modern times were produced by encounters between cultures — typically “primitive” islanders and the seafaring Europeans who colonized them. The British Royal Navy’s expeditions to the Polynesian Islands in the mid-18th century introduced the word tattoo, if not the concept, into European consciousness. (The word derives from the Tahitian word tatau.) As mementos of their voyage, Captain James Cook’s crewmen got tattoos on the island of Tahiti.
On his second expedition to the South Seas, in 1774, Cook returned with two tattooed Tahitian natives, Omai and Tupia, who had served as his guides, and he ultimately displayed the pair as oddities. Trotting out tattooed members of colonized populations became a way for European businessmen to make money, as Margo DeMello writes in Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community. These racist showcases were a literal display of cultural appropriation, which became popularized in Europe and then the United States during the 19th century, when native people in authentic dress were paraded before crowds at the World’s Fair and other events. As DeMello writes, “Native villages paved the way for human oddities like tattooed people and freaks to be shown at world’s fairs and, later, on carnival midways.”
In spite of the crass display of people of color in these contexts, we tend to think of tattoos historically going hand in hand with working-class white masculinity, primarily because, until about 50 years ago, military men accounted for the vast majority of tattoos in America. “A sailor without a tattoo is like a ship without grog: not seaworthy,” said Samuel O’Reilly, who learned to tattoo while serving in the Navy. O’Reilly, the son of Irish immigrants, also patented the first electric tattoo machine, in 1891, basing his design on Thomas Edison’s electric autograph pen, which functioned like an ink stencil, poking tiny holes in paper (or, in this case, skin) and filling them with ink. Tattooists like O’Reilly, who operated a shop on the Bowery in New York City, promulgated a culture of tattooing that was connected with masculine virtues: patriotism, loyalty, courage, and risk-taking. The imagery of late-19th- and early-20th-century tattoos — featuring a proliferation of naked women — codified the machismo of tattoo culture. Because of this imagery, tattooing was even illegal in some places.
Women were getting inked, too, though. In the late 19th century, Victorian women in London began sporting small, discreet tattoos, and the trend traveled to New York. (Winston Churchill’s mother reportedly had a tattoo of a snake on her wrist, which she covered with bracelets when in public.) But any large or visible tattoos on women — women showing bare skin at all, really — were considered subversive, which is why, for a long time, heavily tattooed women were found only at sideshows.
As the 20th century progressed, tattoos were seen as a part of “low” culture, though not counterculture per se. They were associated with the military, the working classes, and derelicts — they were a popular way to pass time and make meaning in prison. It wasn’t until the fifties and sixties that tattoos were paired more overtly with rebellion. This period, often called the Tattoo Renaissance, brought body ink closer to the mainstream. The shops of tattoo artists like Don Ed Hardy and Lyle Tuttle became well-known destinations for a wider array of customers. Biker gangs began to self-identify with tattoos, and musicians and other members of the sixties and seventies counterculture followed suit. Tuttle tattooed Janis Joplin, who was way ahead of her time with a delicate, decorative wrist tat, at his San Francisco shop in 1970. By the 1990s, tattoos were commonplace, visible on rock stars, athletes, and Playboy Bunnies. Ironically, the armed forces are now among the few institutions that regulate body art among their employees, though the Navy recently loosened its regulations to accommodate the heavily inked millennials it seeks to recruit.
As sociologist Katherine Irwin has argued, middle-class people who sought out tattoos but were fearful of their association with lower-class “deviance” made that choice not as an expression of rebelliousness, but rather as a way to embrace “independence.” Getting that dagger on the biceps or a shamrock on the shoulder wasn’t a form of rebellion — it was an announcement of liberation.
Other sociologists, like the University of Toronto’s Michael Atkinson, have argued that middle- and upper-class individuals seek out tattoo culture and get tattooed themselves in order to get close to a deviant subculture without having to fully stake their life or reputation. “Participation in the outsider social practice of tattooing may be utilized as a vehicle for experiencing exhilaration,” he writes in his 2003 book Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body Art. It’s a “carefully designed form of thrilling risk-taking behaviour,” which at this point, unlike more “serious social transgressions,” gives you an easy rush without jeopardizing your safety or your standing in your social world.
Of course, just hearing a sociologist painstakingly deconstruct this ritual is enough to make many punks and other freaks want to run out and get theirs removed — or at least invent a new form of rebellion. The tattoo had a good run, but its days as a symbol of coolness seem to be squarely in the past.
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