Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Tattoos

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

George V, Otzi the Iceman, possibly Winston Churchill and … Kate Lister. What do all these people have in common?They have tattoos. As do a fifth of the population of the United Kingdom.In this episode, Kate speaks to tattoo historian Matt Lodder about the origins of tattoos, their meanings and why certain stereotypes have become attached to them.*WARNING there are naughty words and adult themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Aidan Lonergan.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. This is Kate Lister, and this is me jumping in to forewarn your delicate ears with my fair do's warning. There's some naughty words and some adult themes in this episode. You'd be disappointed if there wasn't, really. We're talking about the history of tattoos today. And if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's do this.

When it comes to first impressions of somebody, what are the things that sway your opinion? Is it their clothes? Is it their mannerisms? Is it the language that they use? What about tattoos? Hmm. What do tattoos say about somebody in this day and age?

It's estimated that around one in five people in the UK have a tattoo. And that raises to about one in three young adults. I certainly have tattoos and I remember that my grandmother hated them. And the most my mother can say about them is, very nice dear. So they've not quite shaken off that stigma yet, have they? But it's an interesting question when so many people are inked. Have we shaken off the stigma? Where did the stigma come from? How did it get attached to tattoos? How far back does that go? When, why and where were tattoos taboo? Why did people get them?

And have the stereotypes and styles changed over the years. Everyone from King Harold II to Justin Trudeau have chosen to ink something permanently on their body. Some of those have made wiser choices than others, but even Winston Churdo. Churchill apparently had an anchor tattooed on his arm. Who knew? Today, we are diving betwixt the sheets to look at the history of the tattoo. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. And welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. From Otzi the Iceman, who is knocking around about 3,400 BC, to an estimated one third of British 30-somethings today.

People have been inking their skin for as long as there has been skin to ink. It has meant different things to different societies, and it has been done using a variety of techniques, and to very differing hygiene standards. Today I am talking to the tattoo expert, Matt Lodder, about his book Painted People and the history of the tattoo art form. But first, we wanted to find out about some of your tattoos and what they mean to you. I have got a tattoo of the words one step at a time

with a feather at the end on my foot because it was probably the first thing I saw on Tumblr or Pinterest when I was about 16 when I got it. For me, I have quite a few tattoos, a little bit of collection happening. We've definitely more planned for the future. The reason is, why not? But I also see all of my tattoos as like an expression of who I am,

and especially because I've been going to the same person for so long now, I've almost become like a walking canvas for them. I've got a tattoo of a gecko, And that's because I think they're super cute. And I guess it's a kind of reminder of my youth, and I guess like how far I've come. I've got one on the inside of my arm that is my great-grandfather's old Army Battalion badge.

And I chose to get this one tattooed sort of with a single needle, hand-poked instead of with a tattoo because I thought it would have been more reminisce of what they might have done whilst they're in the war together or sort of more to the style of the era instead of using a machine, which is a lot more modern.

I'm a learner, tattoo learner, I would say. Hand poke, mainly, stick and poke. Essentially, she's using the needle directly on the skin, not use of machinery or anything else. The people have asked me, I would say the style that has been more popular has been just like ignorance style, I think it's called. It's essentially just fine line, seemingly,

meaningless tattoos like a star or an eye. So to tell us more about what tattoos have symbolised through history, here's Matt. To betwixt the sheets, Matt Loddha. How are you? I'm good. Hi, Kate. I'm honestly one of your biggest fans. So this is a real

pleasure for me to be on your podcast. It's just, yeah. I've admired you from afar for such a long time, and I loved your last book and tell all of my students to read it, so it's just really, really nice to speak to you. Oh, that's so lovely. And I'm absolutely fascinated by yours because I don't know any other tattoo historians. There's not many of us around. There are a few of us. The good thing about it is because it's such a small

area of research. We all get like one bit of it each, basically. Is that like a bit of the body? Like you get the legs and you can do it. Yeah. Well, it's more like a bit of the world or a bit of history, you know, or a methodology. And actually, the good thing about that is we all get to share our work with each other. And there's not a huge amount of terrible rivalry. I'm sure there is some. But Because we all help each other out, yeah. Because academics can be absolute twats. Like when it comes to Cardney, it's just like you don't underestimate the viciousness of some of these bastards. Like when they think that you're on their patch, it gets like, give me the alt-right trolls any day of the week.

When an academic has got up in arms about something, they are the worst. All right, so I'm glad that the tattoo historians, they are relatively civilised to one another. I think we're a bit more civilised than the sex historian. Oh God, yeah. Yeah, we're absolutely bun fight over here. So how did you get into tattoo history? What was it then? Somewhere along the line that you're with, I just need to research this. Yeah, basically, you know, I'm a tattoo guy first and a academic second. You know, I didn't know academia was a thing. I didn't know this was a career path. I just got really obsessed with tattoos really young. I grew up in the 80s and surrounded by WWF wrestlers and heavy metal bands. And I got told two stories. when I was a kid, intended, I think, to put me off getting tattooed, one of which was my granddad, who was a submariner in the Dutch Navy, and he basically said he woke up in a tattooist's chair in Jakarta, drunk on his rum ration, about, as they were about to tattoo a fly on the end of his nose. And he woke up just, and he woke up just in time, thankfully. But that was always the kind of, you know,

warning shot. And then the other story I got told was by my grandma, her mother, my great grandma, had a tattoo that had been done by her younger brother. So basically her younger brother came home one day about 100 odd years ago and said, hey little sister, hey big sister, sorry, can I tattoo you? And she said, will it come off? And he said, yes. Oh, no. So he tattooed her initial on her wrist and she hated it, obviously.

And those two stories were really the kind of genesis. And I just got into it. And I think it's also, you know, when you're a kid, tattoos are basically magic, right? Like, I remember seeing people at the supermarket or on the train or on the bus or whatever. And as a kid, he'd be scribbling on your arms with felt-tip pens. And then it doesn't come off, right? And so I got really, really obsessed with it. And then, yeah, just kept reading books and kept reading magazines and really trying to find out about it as much as I could.

And the more I read, and I'm sure this is really the case for anyone who's doing any kind of academic research in the humanities, I think. The more you read, the less it makes sense sometimes. And you think, oh, okay, I'm going to have to figure this stuff out. And here I am, you know, like a long time later, still figuring it out. I love that. It's an origin story. That's amazing. Yeah, I have described it as like my sort of secret superhero, you know, origin story.

It's brilliant. I love it. Can I ask you like a really basic question for starters? Yeah. What is a tattoo? It's a drawing on the skin. I know that bit. But like, like from a biological point of view, like what is it?

Like the ink is put under the skin. I've got tattoos and I don't know the answer to this. Yeah. So one thing I say a lot actually is like tattooing is a medium, not a phenomenon. So the same way as like toilet wall graffiti and Renaissance frescoes in cathedrals aren't the same thing just because they're both paint on a wall. Tattooing the word that's come to encompass all of this kind of insertion of ink particles in the skin. It has that in common, but there's also loads and those really important differences between the various things that are called tattooing. But fundamentally on a biological level, basically, You need to create a wound that gets you to the middle layer of your skin. So you've got the epidermis, the dermis and the subdermis. The dermis is a layer you want to hit. You use some kind of particles of ink that are non-biodegradable, basically.

So mostly non-organic pigments have been used historically. So things like carbon black soot from fires. I didn't know that. Get into that middle layer and your immune system kicks in and goes, what's this foreign body in my system? I want to protect the system from it. So your body sends these things called macrophages, and they're basically kind of like white blood cells, and they surround the pigment particle to like encapsulate it, so it doesn't cause any further problem to your body.

And then because the pigment particles are too big for your system to flush out effectively, they just stay there. So that's basically how a tattoo works. You just have to get those pigment particles into the right layer. And if you've seen tattoos that either fade really quickly or like spread, that's because they've hit the wrong layer. Because if you go too deep or too shallow, it's got a different type of biology and your skin cells change. Of course, like, as we get older, right, all of our cells in our body regenerate. So what happens is you age. Those cells age, they burst.

They release the pigment particle back into the system. And then it'll be encapsulated again by a new cell. That's why tattoos fade a bit over time. But if you hit the middle layer, that fading happens very, very slowly and very, very gently. I didn't know any of that. I didn't know any of that. I've got tattoos, and I didn't know that. There you go.

This is one of those things where you've got to wonder, how the hell did they discover that? Like, there was a lot of trial and error. Well, yeah, I think so. You know, one of the things I think super interesting about it, and there was a kind of, for a long time, a prevailing idea that somehow some person or some culture discovered tattooing and then it spread around the world.

But actually, it's pretty easy to leave a wound in your body and to get something in it, particularly soot from a fire or oil soot from a lamp or something. into your skin. And there are various ways of doing it. You can do it with a needle grouping vertically. You can do it with a kind of specialised tool. You can actually, in some traditions, you can incise the skin, so open up a wound with a blade essentially and rub ink into it. Or what happens in the Arctic is they actually sew or base pull a sodden sinew through the skin, which leaves a kind of dot-dash pattern. But you can get basically tattooed by.

accident. If you imagine like you're by a fire and you're heating up some rock or something in the fire and it gets to your heart, it explodes. If those pigment particles end up embedding in your skin and then your skin heals as a wound, that mark will be there. Same as like if you're a kid and you hit yourself with a fountain pen or a pencil and you had a little prick on your finger. You might have a little mark there for a while. And I think that's probably the origin of this. It sort of happens by accident. And then you go, wait a minute. Maybe I can do something with that. People like drawing. on their bodies, don't they? Like even as little kids, we've got like, bairos and stuff that we're drawing. So I suppose it's not that far-fetched to

think like they've made like a sort of a wound and then they put something in it and gone, oh, that stays. Yeah, exactly. And we'll never know, of course, like, whether body painting is older than tattooing or whether even cave painting is older than tattooing, you know, but the general consensus amongst people that understand this stuff is that they're probably a roughly coincident, right? Like, human beings generally become creative in a recognizable way about 45,000 years ago. There is some creative practices that go back probably over 100,000 years ago. But like probably at 45,000 years ago, we can presume that something like drawing and painting is something to happen. And I think it makes sense to understand that some of that

might have been tattooing. I mean, one of the things we have a problem with historically is trying to work out the difference between body paint and tattoos in either descriptions or in representations. You know, that's still a very contentious area of history. But as I point out in the book, like the oldest tattoos we've got that survived to the present day in preserved skin are about 5.5,000 years old. Holy hell. That's old, isn't it? Yeah. What were they getting tattooed on themselves five and a half thousand years ago?

Well, the oldest guy that's preserved is a guy who gets called Otsey. I know Otsey. Yep. You know, Otsey. He's got a lovely pair of shoes. He's got a really excellent pair of shoes. So he's like from the early Bronze Age and he has these little tally marks on his body. We don't really anything else about his culture at all. He's like the only person or only specimen

or the only evidence of all of his cultural tradition more or less. So we don't know really know what's going on. He's got these marks on places that people speculate are to do with maybe medicine or magic because they're on places like his joints. But around the same age and maybe even they might even turn out to be slightly older in pre-Dynastic Egypt. They There are naturally preserved mummies. So basically men and women who died in the desert and whose bodies just survived in the desiccation of the dry desert heat. And they've got like the man or one of the men of that grouping

has got a big cool ass bull tattoo on his arm. A bull? So, yeah. Well, and it's still recognisable like all these years later. It's still a bull. More or less. More or less. They had to, you have to look at it under ultraviolet light.

So it wasn't visible to the naked eye. but recently they've been doing these new scans and yeah, it turns out there's all these tattoos are kind of pinging up. I mean, there's an amazing Egyptian mummy from younger than that from the dynastic period and she's got this hieroglyph on her throat that says like, do good

and they reckon it's like a kind of like icing well or some kind of like... Oh my God, that sounds so modern. That's just like, there are TikTokers that have got like patterns and hyroglyphed like, do good, be kind. And it's wow. Yeah, exactly.

That's blown my mind. Yeah. And that was a mummy which was only recently, it had been sort of discovered a long time ago, but no one had really paid attention to it. And this archaeologist called Anne Austin did some new work on it and studied her and did some work on who she might have been and what her story was. She's got like all these amazing, like hieroglyphic tattoos on her and symbols of her religious practice. She was a priestess or perhaps an adherent of this goddess called Hathor,

who's like this kind of mother goddess in the Egyptian pantheon. So yeah, and she's got this amazing. amazing, amazing, like, throat tattoo, which I just, her head had long been stolen from the grave, so we don't know what her head was like, but she's got this incredible throat tattoo, which is just so badass. That's just, it makes me wonder, like, how, I don't suppose we'll ever know, but how commonplace was this in, like, ancient Egypt if we're turning up mummies with, like, enormous throat tattoos? It's hard to know.

I mean, one of the things I think probably that's really of interest to your area of expertise is, like, a lot of the tattooed mummies that were discovered or have been discovered until really recently from that tradition have been women, right? And of course, what kind of women get tattooed, Kate? Right? Loose, loose courtesans. Awful women, frankly. Exactly.

So for ages, Egyptologists were like, well, all of these mummies of tattooed women must have been like concubines or members of the harum. Or, yeah. Or, you know, even kind of like the lover of the pharaoh in the afterlife and stuff. And of course that's just putting modern, by which I mean 19th and mid-20th century perceptions about tattooing onto this archaeological tradition. They just looked at it and went, those are ancient Egyptian tramp stamps. We know exactly what kind of women these were. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And it's taken more recent work by more sensible historians to try and disambiguate that. But yeah.

And that was for a long time, that's what they thought when they were turning up tattooed mummies. That's been the thesis of female tattooing in Egypt from about the, you know, the middle of the 19th century right up until about yesterday. Like, you know, there's some really, really good new work being done by some scholars, one called René Friedman and another one here called Anne Austin, who are studying Egyptian mummy tattooing in much more detail than ever has been before. I mean, to answer your specific question about how common it was, I mean, it seems like it was pretty common amongst high-ranking women.

There are some tattooed men, but a lot more studies being done at the moment. and going back with these new imaging techniques with different kind of, you know, some lasers and machines that go ping and they're finding tattooing where they didn't find any before. So that's a really interesting story that's really being written as we speak. Wouldn't you just lose your shit if they, like, found a Tasmanian devil tattoo on one of them? Weirdly, though, right? You know, like the tropes don't change very much.

I talk about, again, in the book, these pilgrims who were getting tattooed in Jerusalem them about 350 or years ago. And like their tattoos wouldn't look out of place on a premiership footballer, right? Like not much changes. Oxy's got a tramp stamp. He's got a little tattoo on his lower back. Oxy has a tramps. I love it.

Right, okay. Otsy the ice man. He was about 5,000 years ahead of his time. Wow. Okay. And what was his tramp stamp? What was it, a butterfly? Yeah, he's got some of these lines again tattooed on his lower back.

So again, the theory is maybe he had some back pain. Medicine. That's what everyone with a tramp stamp is now going to say. It's like, look, it is actually medicinal. It's good for me. It's good for me, mom. Although I did read somewhere. Tramp stamps are coming back.

Yeah, they are because the reasons they came around in the first place is that if clothing is low-rise clothing and high-rise things. Of course, the low-rise, oh, Gen Z, if I can, please don't do it. Don't bring back the low-rise jeans. We spent so long getting rid of them. I know. Well, all the stuff, all the stuff that I thought and we thought in our generation was really uncool, is now really, really hip again amongst teenagers, because of course

it is. This is true. Growing older sucks. So early on through the history, we have this sort of link that people, quite high-ranking people, people might be getting tattoos for medicinal reasons, that they were pre-stresses. How did we get to the point where we are today, where my grandmother would have what called them cheap? I remember her saying that quite distinctly. They are cheap. Quite the opposite. Tatees are quite expensive. They have been for a quite expensive. They have been for Expensive, actually, Grandma, I'll have you known. Yeah, Vogue magazine was talking about tattoo pricing in the early 20th century. And prices haven't changed a lot, actually, since then.

They're in real terms. Good tattooing has always been pretty expensive. I mean, so in the Western context, tattooing, you know, we haven't had in Europe or in Western Europe a mainstream tattoo tradition. So it's always been sort of subcultural. It becomes a business. It becomes an industry. basically because rich people want to get tattooed. So we only have tattoo shops and tattoo businesses

because in about 1880 in England, rich people wanting to get tattooed because it was kind of fashionable. And the people that had been tattooing in the army and whatever for years, all of a sudden found themselves in demand to tattoo members of the House of Lords. So it's only rich people that...

Really? The House of Lord were getting tattooed in the 19th century? Yeah. I mean, as again... I did not know this. Yeah, the only reason we have a tattoo industry because people like Lord Lonsdale, for example, or George Edwards MP is another one that comes to mind. The Marshness of Londonderry, like Edward the 7th, George V. What did they have tattooed? Do we know? Yeah, most of those people just mentioned were getting quite Japanese-style stuff

because everything Japanese was pretty trendy. Or they were getting tattoos of kind of sexy French salon pictures. Yeah, nothing has changed. Exactly. Again, exactly. I'll be back with Matt after this short break. Welcome to Gone Medieval, the podcast that will dust off and polish up some of the medieval period's most fascinating characters and stories. So this is a really kind of funny way where medieval people differ from us immensely because as far as they are concerned, sexual desire and interest in sex is a feminine trait.

It's a very difficult one, isn't it? I mean, I think that Henry I did not probably intend to be buried under a school. And he is one of the great kings of medieval history. We found that about 18% of our sample had evidence of bunions. So we think this change over time is directly related to the type of footwear that people were wearing. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis. And a gone medieval will tell you just why the so-called dark ages really weren't that dark after all.

Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. The first really big important tattoo shop in the UK was on German Street in the West End. there were tattoos on the strand. So this isn't just like the sideshow attraction, the tattooed lady, the tattooed man. No, that sort of comes along a bit later on in the UK. I mean, sort of as the wealthy lose interest, it does tend to kind of become a bit more de-classé. There's also a sort of stratification, right? So where the wealthy people are in these beautiful appointed studios, that then generates a kind of more downmarket client base.

and actually the side shows, or in London, actually, it was the Royal Aquarium, which you may have heard of, which began as an aquarium, this Victorian kind of, well, we're going to educate the masses. And it turns out like, A, keeping fish alive is really difficult. And B, people don't really like fish. So they had these huge tanks of water, and they started staging recreations of like naval battles in them instead. And it became this like huge, yeah, it was a kind of pleasure part. basically you'd go, you could see tattooed ladies and tattooed men. You could get tattooed. It also, of course, became a place of like vice and sex work. But yeah, you could go and see a

tattooed lady. It was a good excuse to go and see a lady without many clothes on and pretend that you're... I was just going to ask you that. Like, how close is that association? Because there is something sexy about the tattooing process because inevitably it would probably mean taking your clothes off. And if you want to show someone, you have to take your clothes off. Exactly. Yeah. And so much of the tattoo history that I look at, particularly the tattooing process, the 19th and 20th centuries is oh my god women are getting tattooed now and look at this picture of this woman with not many clothes on relative to the period and how awful her tattoos are so it was a good excuse to kind of print a bit of female flesh in the newspaper when you wouldn't have otherwise done so

and you know and the erotic allure is also kind of undeniable and particularly with tattooing on women in the period it largely gets to be decorative so it's ankles it's on wrists and then it's kind of intimated that it's in more private areas. You know, they'd be all this gossip about who had what going on underneath their skirts and underneath their blouses. So, yeah, like that kind of story both kind of drives the interest in it and then is contributary to this reason why by the middle of the 20th century it becomes a bit more taboo. I mean, to answer your specific question of why your grandma, and I'm going to presume

that your grandma's about the same age as mine, tattooing really gets stigmatized in Britain like after the Second World War. It's never totally, even when aristocrats are. doing it. It's a bit weird, a bit naughty, a bit odd, a bit eccentric, but it's not kind of stigmatised. And what happens in the 50s, basically, is several things. One is that loads of people who are tattooed, but the only tattoos that are visible are those on people who are showing their bodies at work. So if you're digging the road, for example, and you're rolling your sleeves up, you can see your tattoos. If you're a bank manager or a member of the royal family, those tattoos

are not going to be visible, right? Because it just wasn't the done thing to roll your sleeves up and at work. So that's, I think, the main thing. There's just the tattooing that people saw is not the totality of tattooing that was happening. The other things were like tattooing just got out of fashion because lots of people of the previous generation who fought in the war were tattooed. And so younger people were like, oh, don't look like you, dad, like it's happening now with Gen Z. And, of course, it's just fashion's changing, right? So modernism's happening. Furniture, clothes, cars, design.

everything is becoming modernist sleek, monochrome, and all of that kind of art deco, art nouveau stuff is just kind of out of fashion and that chinty thing that tattooing represents just kind of goes out of fashion. And then of course, you know, there's the other thing that tattooing becomes very linked for a while with the Holocaust

and with concentration camp numbers. God, yes, of course. I hadn't even thought about that, but of course. Yeah. So in the 50s, again, lots of stories and as more and more comes out during the Nuremberg trials, etc, about what was happening in Auschwitz, those stories about tattooing as stigmatisation, really, really kick in the public imagination. So all of those things kind of combine. And that moment in the 50s is a time when, at least as far as the mainstream is

concerned, like tattooing is in a pretty dark place. Although, you know, even then there are tattooers who are championing the art form, who are, there's a great, like, letter correspondence in the whole daily male in the early 50s where the women's page, you know, writer who goes by the student in Miss Humber, obviously. Basically, it's like, what will women think of next? And then these women write in, these young girls write in and they say, we're not like drunken sailors, we've just got pretty tattoos on our shoulders that we can show off in our evening dresses. Right. And that's like in 1952, 1953. So even in that kind of real dark time, there are people trying to push back against the narrative, you know?

I suppose there is always kind of a dark undertone to them. And it wasn't, it's not about the Holocaust, but it wasn't so long ago that I very, very near. tweeted a picture of a tattoo that's held at the Welcome Trust because it was of a nude woman and I thought it was interesting, blah, blah, blah. And I didn't because I was like, I don't know who this belongs to. And I couldn't find anything either about where those specimens came from. And they've got loads, haven't they? Yeah. So those were collected in 1994 in Paris. They were bought by one of Henry Welcomes Outriders, basically, who essentially, you know, the guy who was using a pseudonym, probably a guy that worked at the Paris Medical School. My colleague Gemma Angel,

who teaches at the University of Leicester, like did her PhD on those specimens in detail, knows a lot about them. But basically, yeah, this guy in Paris said, oh, I've got a job, a lot of tattoos for you, mate. Do you want them? That's just dodgy as fuck, isn't it? Yeah. And then they get brought back to London and put in a collection. There's about 300 of them. They are almost certainly from French. criminals and soldiers. So people who died in the kind of custody of the French state, basically. And it was a pretty done thing just to kind of cut those off.

And Gemma has done loads of good work of trying to at least trace where she can, the life stories of some of these people, because she's found images in the French police archives of some of these men when they were alive. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. And they wouldn't have given their permission or would they have needed to, actually, in the rules of that time. And that's a whole other conversation.

But I think, like, the other interesting thing about those stories is that the UK has very specific laws about human remains and human remains display, but they don't apply to things that are European and they don't apply to things that are European that are more than 100 years old. So they apply to human remains that have been acquired, however euphemistic that term is, in each case, from places around the world. Those things can be deaccessions. But those laws.

don't apply to European specimens of greater than 100 years of age. God. Because it was just sort of the done thing for European medical doctors and pathologists and atoms. Oh, that's interesting. I'll keep that. Thanks very much. I suppose from a historical point of view, it's kind of good because you can see what

kind of tattoos people are having in the 1920s. And you can see what the techniques were like. You know, like when people are saying, oh, I've got a flower, I've got a bird or whatever it is, it's like, yeah, but would it have been good or would it have been shit. Yeah. Yeah, well that's one of the challenges that we have as tattoo historians actually and why some of those archives are really useful. One of the best things that Gemma discovered actually was one of the biggest specimens. It's in two pieces. It's a guy's front. So it's his whole front in two pieces. His nipples are still on the dry preserves for your listeners. And on one

side of this guy's body, he's got a portrait of a young little girl. And there was a French criminologists actually writing about it in the 1930s saying this must be an image of his daughter, this must be an image because it's on his heart, it's an image of someone he loves deeply, and had done this really kind of diagnostic thing with it. And Gemma discovered the image was actually from a baby food advert. What was the thought process there? Well, I guess like the idea that tattooing is this deeply revelatory thing about your personal circumstances is a very deep idea. And I think that's one of the things I want to push back on. And lots of us doing that history we want to push back on. Because actually, you know, tattooing, if you think about it as an art

form or as a commercial practice, this guy goes in. Maybe he does want a picture of his daughter, but he hasn't got a photograph of her, right, because we don't have polaroids or whatever. So the tattooist has just got a kind of flashbook, has got a collection of things that he's cut out from a magazine and he's stuck them in a book. And the guy's gone, yeah, well, there you go, that's a baby. Stick that on me. That's a, yeah. Maybe he's just, I can only do babies. That's it. That's all I can do. Yeah. I'm really good at them, but I can only do this particular baby. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I've practiced for this particular baby a lot. But I love that example because it does just kind of unpick a lot of people's assumptions about what tattooing is doing. I mean, it's the same in a way as that Egyptian example, right? Like if you assume a tattoo is doing a certain thing or significant of a certain thing and you're not careful about having those conversations, you end up in potentially some really silly and weird places.

Well, you do, don't you? So these tattoos that are in the welcome, I'm so glad that you've been able to say where they're from, because I'm always wonders. So these were taken from people in the military and criminals. Do we have any evidence that the criminal population or the naval army military population was more tattooed than others? Because there's that association as well, that criminals have tattoos, or is that just nonsense? Well, criminals do have tattoos. That's undeniable. The things we don't really have is a comparative study, because, when those studies were first done, they just went, oh, look, there's loads of tattooed people in prison. Therefore, tattooing must be indicative of criminality, right? This is happening in the middle the 19th century. Science, yeah. And they didn't, people in particular, like Lombroso in Italy in Lackassania in France, like didn't do comparative studies about how widespread tattooing was

in the general population. And where they did do comparisons, it was comparisons with soldiers. And actually, one of the things that prisoners and soldiers have in common is a lot of free time where they're bored. They have the means, most of an opportunity to create marks on their skin. So in the army, on the Navy, you've got gunpowder, in prison, you've got things like dust off of the walls. And you've got sharp things, you know, for sewing your socks up, and you can create those marks. You've also got this slightly paradoxical thing where you're you're in uniform or you're dehumanized or de-individualized as a prisoner or is someone in the military. And so a tattoo is a good way of individualising yourself. But also, of course,

the other thing that happens in the military and in prisons, and also in football teams and private schools, which is also where a lot of this tattooing happens, is that people who have nothing in common really particularly are put together in the same circumstance. So a tattoo can kind of bizarrely and paradoxically mark you out as an individual, but can also connect you to your rag-tag bunch of people that you've been thrown in common circumstance with. And so there are kind of good reasons why I think criminals might have more tattoos

than people who aren't in prison that aren't related to the fact that somehow tattooing is indicative of criminal behaviour. There's a chapter in the book about these two young women, Mary Cunningham and Jane White, who were from London and this is like the 1840s or so.

And they're basically having a nice night out in London. and this guy comes up to them and he's drunk and he's sort of giving them a little bit of a little bit of lip and they say, oh, what are you looking for, mate? And he's this sort of drunken like guy up in town for business, right? And he says, oh, I'm looking for a bit of fun. They're like, oh, we'll come back to ours, right? So they take him back to theirs.

They get him to buy all the drink. When that runs out, they go out and get more drink on his money. They're getting him sloshed. Eventually, he's like passing out and they nick his purse and he wakes up. and notices that he's stolen his purse and they do a runner, the police find him with his pants

around his ankles, right? To which he says, oh yeah, I was just heading to bed. That's why I made pants around my ankles. It's like, yeah, okay, mate. And they capture these two young women and they discover that up the chimney breast

is this guy's money. So they get arrested. And it turns out they've got tattoos, right? And the tattoos they've got, as far as the cops are concerned, mark them out as a member of this really, fearsome tattooed gang called the 40 Thieves, which would terrorise London for decades. And actually, if you look at the history of the 40 Thieves and this supposed mark of the 40 Thieves,

you actually end up with like, oh, well, sometimes it's some dots on the hand, sometimes it's a triangle, sometimes it's a name, sometimes it's a cross. And looking at their prison records and their transportation records, because both of them were transported to Australia, you can see that both of them had lots of tattoos on their bodies. And it takes this jailer, a guy called Waddington, who I, one of my heroes in the book, actually, to go, no, just because they've got tattoos doesn't mean they're part of a tattooed gang. Right? Just because just there's lots of people who aren't in the gang. The gang doesn't even exist. Shit. Yeah. And so he noticed this, this guy, Waddington. He noticed this in 1838, right? But like the FBI in the U.S.

USA are still doing that. They're like, oh, you've got this tattoo. This must mean you're part of a tattooed gang. I mean, it's, but we kind of like that, don't we like, like secret symbols? I mean, you know, Dan Brown's made his fortune out of writing things about, oh, it's a secret code for this, that and the other. Is there any, I mean, I know there are gang symbols and kind of gang. I wouldn't fucking know what a gang tattoo look like if it slapped me in the face unless it said, I am a member of a gang. And then I'd be like, okay, fair enough. Well, the thing is, you see, you can't assume that necessarily because, Anyone can get any more tattoo than their body, right?

People occasionally email me and say, like, what does this mean? Or, like, years ago, I got a message on Tumblr back in the day from someone going, oh, this is Harry Stiles' tattoos. Does it mean he's in love with Louis? Okay. Like trying to do this decoding thing. But, yes, of course, in some narrow contexts, some tattoos do mean specific things. So particularly in, like, Russian prison gangs is the best example.

there is a very narrow syllabry there, a very narrow coded visual lexicon for those designs. But it doesn't mean that anyone with that tattoo in any other context is part of that gang or whatever. You've got to be careful, of course, but we can't assume that X symbol always means Y meaning. And that's again the problem that I think that comes out of that same moment of the 19th century of criminology,

which is they wanted to do that. They wanted to say, what does this tattoo tell us? or even what is your body, what is your skin colour, what is the shape of your head, tell us about your character. And tattooing was thought to be a good way of reading someone's character on their body. And yeah, and we're still there.

I had a friend years ago who had a tear drop tattooed on him, right? Because it's kind of classic thing. That's supposed to have been like that you killed somebody. Right. I've heard that. Yeah, yeah. So he went on honeymoon to America, to Florida with his wife. and he got stopped at immigration by a border guard.

And the border guard said to him, oh, you haven't declared your incarceration history, sir. And he was like, what are you talking about? Shit. And he was like, no, I know what that means. Before I was a border guard, I worked in the prison system. I know what it means to have that tattoo. Like, it means you've been in prison and you've killed someone.

And he was like, no, I'm just a to-tot-ist from Nottingham, mate. What are you talking about? Shit. And yeah, and when he got home, he tattooed over it, I think, or removed it. Yeah, you fucking what I'm doing, yeah. Yeah. You want to be careful with this stuff. I mean, also, from a kind of criminal point of view, increasingly, it's probably a bad idea to tattoo yourself if you want to be a criminal.

Like the Yakuza in Japan, yeah, the Yakuza in Japan, who are the kind of, you know, again, other famous example of that, probably outside of Russia. And the Russians gangs, too, are sort of, they're souring a bit on tattooing because it makes it harder to be a criminal. That's true. It's kind of dumb. If you proudly mark your criminal affiliations on your body, it's going to make life easier for people that want to arrest you. And racists do it as well. This was relatively new to me that there is actually sort of a coded system that extreme

rights and kind of those groups use. And then my last tattoo, I was chatting away to the tattooist as you do. And I just learned at this information that like, well, is it like 88 if that's tattooed, that's the eighth letter of the alphabet, which is an H. And it's H.H. H.H. Heil Hitler. So it's like a coded Nazi thing. I was mentioning this to her. And she'd never fucking heard of it.

Yeah, that comes out of American, like, white supremacist prison gangs and wider white supremacist conversations. I mean, I feel sorry for all these kids that were born in 1988 that are getting tattoos. You've got that quite innocently just, like maybe in your email password or like, you know, you've got like a rugby shirt with it on or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you have got to be careful with this stuff and you can get yourself into trouble if you're not careful. But that exactly does demonstrate the risks of assuming that X equals Y. I mean, that's why I think art history as a method set, looking at the images and their contexts, is it often a more useful way of thinking about tattoos than sociology or psychology or whatever

because art history is a way of actually looking at like, where does this image come from, what does it tell us, what's it communicating to the world, how does it relate to the broader visual culture contexts of its moment, yeah, all of their stuff. Is there any evidence that tattoos have been used sort of in the queer community to signify certain things? Is that kind of myth as well? No, quite the opposite. I think what's been really interesting about the research and certainly talking about the research recently is that a huge amount of the work I've been doing outside of the book actually has been on queer histories in end of the 20th century Britain. And there's

a story in the book of a guy called Mr. Sebastian who was like the first professional body piercer in the UK and also a really like pioneering tattooer. And he was a gay guy. He trained as an art teacher in Liverpool. And yeah, tattooed pretty much exclusively. gay men. And the thing about saying early run about tattoos being hidden under clothing, a lot of queer tattooing, certainly until the middle of the 90s, was not just under clothing, but under underwear. So completely hidden, even if you saw someone in their nice big wife fronts, right? But underneath, entirely covered. And I mean like entirely covered, right? Like genital tattooing, anal tattooing, like completely covered with the filthiest, most delightful stuff you ever seen. And what was

What was interesting about him is that because he wasn't cannibalizing anyone else's customers, most of the other tattooers in London really respected him and left him alone. In fact, quite the, you know, they'd send customers to him if someone came in and wanted their dick tattooing. Yeah, they say to them go and see Alan. So, yeah, tattooing is this really, really big part of gay culture, but it's not a big documented part of it. There's work that I allude to in the book, but I'm doing more work on at the moment of an even older sort of subculture of that. So right back into the 1920s and through the 50s, there's lots and lots of pictures of people who are clearly identifying at the time as men, as cis men, but who are tattooed with bra

and pants, who are tattooed with like lace underwear. So there's some kind of a gender identity thing happening here, you know, like maybe it's statistic or maybe it's a way of signaling a kind of gender identity in an era where you can't be out as trans, so we don't have the language even to talk about that. But yeah, there's some great photos of very sort of straight-looking middle-class, middle-aged men tattooed with lovely frilly lace bras and pants. Wow. Yeah.

And then the other interesting about that conversation is that where tattooing does get talked about in the gay community or in the history of gay fashion, it's often as a kind of like, oh, parodic masculinity, right? These guys in the 80s, these sort of gay skinheads are appropriating the far right stuff in a kind of sexy, parodic way. And definitely some of that going on. But actually, again, if you look at the details here, you find that, for example, some of these gay guys had SS roons tattooed on them. The American National Socialist Party advertised in gay SM magazines, like recruitment ads were placed. And also, some gay skinheads were also fascist skinheads.

The line is not a bright divide. Some of these guys on the far right, including most famously, the organiser of the British Union of fascists, a guy called Nicky Crane, were also themselves gay, closeted nonetheless. But, yeah, Tattooing has this kind of really interesting, important role in gay culture and gay history in Britain and in the US, but that isn't something that gets talked about very much. No, that's fascinating. I could talk to it for forever, but I can't.

I suppose my final question, and it's a big one, is, like, where are we up to with Tattoo in today? because even in my lifetime, I remember, like, you wouldn't be able to get certain jobs if you had tattoos. And I think that's moving now. I remember being front page news when a teacher had a tattoo. That kind of thing. Like, where are we up to now? And would you ever want tattoos to be taken completely off the naughty step?

Well, you know, I always say if you want to know about the present or future of tattoos, don't ask a middle-aged man who's a historian. You know, like I'm supremely unqualified to talk about the present and the future. But, you know, I think the thing to say is, right, we're in a situation where tattooing is certainly more visible than ever because there's more of it going on and also because clothing is much more casual. So people can wear t-shirts at work, right? So there's a kind of this visibility thing is perpetuitive. And it's definitely the case, yeah, that workplaces are more liberal with tattooing than they have been in the past, even in the past decade or so. That's also undeniable. There was a kind of survey recently, which I've been talking about a lot in UGov, which suggested this. that Gen Z are more skeptical of tattoos in the workplace than Gen X and Millennials, which I think tells us something about potentially like anxieties about getting jobs and also just as I said, the sort of fading of tattooing from fashion. But I also want to say, you know, as a sort of caution note there, like,

the press have always been telling us that tattooing is the hot new thing and acceptable now. I've got examples of that going back to the 1880s or even before. or there is an article that I love citing, which came out in London magazine called City Life in 1981, so like one year after I was born, which is like, everyone's doing it now, including university lecturers, right? So this is 40 years ago.

And so the story is, I think, rather than one as often gets told, the present being disconnected from the past. And I think you probably get this with sex history too as well, right? Like, it's not the present is completely separate from the past, is that actually things are different now than they were, but there's no clean way we can divide the present from the past. And it's actually a pretty unbroken connective tissue,

which gets us, like there was an ITV news program in the 1950s called the radiance of tattooing, like telling us how trendy tattooing was. As I said, I've got examples of that kind of cliche from literally every decade for 140 years. So, yeah, it's, you know, tattooing is definitely more popular than ever, but it's, and I don't think it's ever going to be, as you said, off the naughty step. Because there's something in Western culture, in Western Christian culture, we have lots of very fundamental beliefs about embodiment and our relationship to time, which tattooing disrupts.

So it involves being touched by a stranger. It involves voluntarily submitting yourself to pain. It involves giving up kind of being with the moment in terms of how you dress and appear, amongst other things. And so even though it kind of waxes and wanes in its acceptability or visibility, it's always, I think, going to be weird. And yeah, like long may it remain so. I hope so. I'll be gutted if after, you know, that it suddenly becomes mainstream that Jacob Rees-Mogg revealed a massive tattoo of Margaret Thatcher or something and then would all be like, shit. Well, you know, like Roger Stone has that tattoo on his back of Richard Nixon, you know, which is probably a good American equivalent of that. Yeah, Roger Stone has a portrait of Richard Nixon

tattooed massive on his, like, beneath his shoulder blades. Who know? I don't, I mean, I mean, I I am shuddering to think what Jacob Riesbogg is hiding underneath his massively oversized, badly fitting suits. Oh, Matt, you've been so much fun to talk through. If people want to know more about you and about your work and about tattoos, where can they find you? So the book is called Painted People. It's out now. I do a podcast, which is called Beneath the Skin, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts. I'm on Twitter at Matt Lodder.

I teach at the University of Essex. and if you shout into the void, carry a pigeon, semaphore, I will get word of it eventually. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Kate. It's so much fun. Thanks for listening and thank you so much to Matt for joining us. Wasn't he fantastic?

And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.