Life stories, writ large
Remarks on the history of modern tattoos
This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
As Edith Piaf almost sang, je regrette plusieurs choses. Every so often I have agonising laser sessions in order to remove my tattoos. Dale Turner, my tattoo remover, is a good sort, though, and has a veritable treasury of amusing anecdotes with which he regales me while I squirm under his red-hot laser lens.
“From time to time I recognise people I met years ago,” Dale once said over my whimpering, “who I advised as youngsters not to get tattooed with the name of their then love interest. They always come up to me saying ‘Hey, you’re Dale, aren’t you? I’m so glad you encouraged me not to get that tattoo of ‘Leonora’ with a heart through it!”
The great majority of people, though, love their inked skins, and with over a quarter of Britons now having one, there is a lot of skin to love. Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art does not comment on the recent explosion of tattooing. Instead, Dr Matt Lodder begins with the proclamation that public “amnesia” about the history of tattooing “results from a lack of access to good quality information”.
This statement is curious, given that the author himself makes a very sizeable omission in his book. The ancient world — Greek, Persian and beyond — was filled with ink, even if it was employed as a disgraceful punishment more often than through personal choice.
Given the wealth of primary sources about the ancient origins of tattooing, it is somewhat astounding that Lodder makes no mention of this in his book, preferring instead to start his history of Western tattooing as late as the eighteenth century. After all, we have before us “the UK’s foremost expert on the history of tattooing”.
The primary driver for the rapid growth of tattoos in Victorian Britain was the royal family
In spite of this strange absence, the book is filled with interesting trivia. Droll is the story of a mid-nineteenth-century female tattoo artist of Philadelphia, whose name is lost to history but who made the local news gazette by tattooing the thighs of women with the names of their lovers. Two women “came in on consecutive days asking to be permanently marked,” Lodder wryly notes, “with the name of the same local politician”. The chapter “Tattooing in High Society” contains riveting mention of tattoo parlours in High Victorian England imbued with “the thrilling melody of caged songsters filling the air with their shrill music, and the odour of cigarettes and brandy”.
Lodder interestingly notes that the primary driver for the rapid growth of tattoos in Victorian Britain was driven by “the British royal family’s embrace of the art in Japan, which stemmed from visits to the country following the Meiji Restoration”. He reveals that Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, was tattooed while visiting the Enryokan Palace in Tokyo in 1869, and that “every royal visitor from then on was tattooed, right through to the 1920s”.
A touching chapter, “Tattooing During and After Wartime”, remarks that the First World War brought a boom to tattoo parlours across Britain, as “men heading to the Front stood in line to have marks of love, patriotism, and home tattooed on their skin”.
Lodder notes that the shift in clientele from the high-society customers of the late nineteenth century to the less wealthy patrons of the twentieth century meant that “designs grew smaller, cheaper”. We learn that popular designs of the time included simple names, regimental emblems and flags, “as well as sentimental tokens of love and memory” — but for the regimental emblems (now ever rarer), plus ça change.
Photographs survive, Lodder continues, of women working in munitions factories, “proudly displaying the names of their sweethearts tattooed on their arms alongside memorial crosses added later to commemorate their untimely deaths at the front”. By the 1930s, tattooing had become “the rage in London society”; by the 1950s, tattooing fell from fashion for all social classes — “tattooing was no longer a youthful fad, but the habit of tragically unfashionable elders”.
Lodder is something of a romantic. “To those who feel tattooing’s allure deeply, in all its romance and mystery, there will always be something profoundly magical about making indelible marks on skin.”
He doesn’t tell us about his own. Although the book is an interesting read, and particularly insightful about the nineteenth century, its pictorial content lends itself better to the coffee table than the history shelf of the home library.
