Dan Snow's History Hit - Ink: A History of Tattooing

Episode Date: January 5, 2020

Matt Lodder is the world's leading expert on the history of tattoos. He has found evidence of people using ink or charcoal on their bodies stretching back thousands of years. He explodes myths at every turn. Tattoos were common long before Captain Cook allegedly imported them back from the Pacific in the 18th Century, and he demonstrates that they were never the exclusive preserve of marginalised subcultures, but actually adorned the bodies of royalty.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got a great pod for you now. Everything you think you know about tattooing, everything is wrong. Every single thing. And that is why Dr. Matt Lauder, who is a brilliant communicator, historian, academic, here in the UK,

he's going to challenge everything you knew about tattooing. By the end of this podcast, not only will you be fascinated by tattooing, you'll want to go and get yourself inked. I certainly did. I'm still thinking about it, but I'm a bit too scared to be absolutely honest with you. Enjoy this podcast. It's been filmed. It'll be available soon, together with lots of illustrations and pictures at historyhit.tv, the Netflix for history that I started. It's screaming into its third year now,

screaming into maturity. You can, the January sale is on. Just use the code January at checkout. January. And you will get a month for free and then you get four months, just one pound, euro, dollar, rupee

for each of those four months. So enjoy that. And whatever you do, enjoy this treat from Matt Lodder. Dude, thanks very much for coming on the show.

Pleasure. Long overdue. Yeah. Now, listen, man, you are Mr. Tattoos, Mr. Ink. You've got to tell us, big urban myth number one, Captain Cook brought discovered tattoos in the Pacific and introduced them, well, and his crew introduced them back to the UK. True or false?

Absolutely not true. What? Yeah. So, I mean, there's been a lot of thinking and writing about that. It really seeps into the popular imagination that, like, yeah, no tattooing in Britain before, you know, 1769. And, yeah, it turns out some of his crew might have even been tattooed before they left. Really? Yeah.

So lots of tattooing happening in London in the immediate run-up and, you know, centuries beforehand. And actually what I think is really interesting is actually how little impact Pacific tattooing has on what's happening in Britain. So, you know, people don't really come back covered in like, you know, cool Polynesian tattooing really. They just keep getting the same kind of things they've been getting for centuries beforehand. getting the same kind of things they've been getting for centuries beforehand. But it's this, yeah, it's this real kind of moment of myth that somehow, you know, tattooing begins with a specific encounter and absolutely not.

Okay, can I just get, ask really stupid questions? Yeah. How is a tattoo different to painting your body? Okay, so well, basically, the technology for a tattoo is pretty simple. It's just making a hole in the skin, getting some ink in that hole, however you might want to do that, and letting that heal over, and the ink heals in the middle layer of the skin.

So your skin's got three layers. You've got the dermis, the subdermis, and the epidermis. Epidermis on top, of course. You want to hit the dermal layer, the middle layer. If you hit that right, the skin cells will agglomerate the ink ink and it will stay in there pretty much as long as you're alive. Yeah, and we find tattooing pretty much in every culture ever in the world that we've ever documented. Because presumably it's quite hard to find evidence for tattooing, is it, in very old cultures? Well, yeah, so the oldest, like, confirmed here's a tattoo evidence we have is obviously really

preserved skin, to be sure. Like, Otzi, whatever he's called. Otzi, yeah. Otzi. Otzi. Otzi. Yeah, 5,000 years BC. Any ink on Otzi? Yeah, he's covered in tattoos. What? Yeah, he's got, like, he's got tattoos on his knees and tattoos on his joints. Lots of thinking that they might have been medicinal, maybe, or kind of magical, because they're sort of on places that they reckon he might have had arthritis and stuff.

He's got small little crosses and dash marks tattooed on him. There's some mummies from the chinchorro uh people in chile about a slightly younger about um again just slightly under 5 000 years old um in chile as preserved skin there's some new radiocarbon dating being done on some egyptian um mummies which are a bit older than that but you know you find basically kind of things that could be tattooing right back into the Neolithic in terms of, you know, anthropomorphic sculpture and things like that. And actually, so this guy called Hambly in the 1920s wrote a book called The History of Tattooing. And he sort of had this idea that tattooing was so weird and so strange and so kind of bonkers that it must have had some kind of origin point. Like it must have been invented somewhere and spread around the world um but actually i think probably it's it

just seems to kind of you know it seems to be quite a basic human instinct actually to mark your body because we find it you know we find it in in australia we find it in the americas up to the arctic we find it in north africa um in europe So it seems to be a pretty kind of basic instinct to want to kind of inscribe something on your skin. And I guess it would have been easy enough, like sometimes when you read about people's preparations for like magic mushrooms and making drugs, like how do they work that out?

They leave it for three weeks. But with tattooing, presumably it's not super complicated to imagine how they might have discovered that certain things will stain your skin permanently. Yeah, because all you need is something sharp, so bone or flint or chopstick or feather, and basically some ink, which is essentially carbon. And you can basically get tattoos in your skin accidentally if you're caught in an explosion next to a fire or something and some ash or some carbon gets under your skin and the wounds heal with the carbon under it.

So you can see very quickly how that becomes like, oh, okay, yeah, I see how that works, this is going to work. I mean, for example, in the Arctic, so amongst like Inuit peoples, they tattoo by sewing. So they have a needle and a sort of sinew thread that's made of like walrus skin or seal skin. They cover that in ink and then they stitch it through the skin, pulling that inky kind of inky soaked thread through and you get a dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dash pattern. And of course, you can see how, you know, if you're sewing your, sewing your, your skillset together and you prick your finger, oh, wait a minute, that's healed up and I've got a little black mark there.

How did that work? You know, and that, that's quite straightforward. Yeah. So it's just, it's just this really, really basic thing that we find pretty much everywhere. And is it possible to chart the different reasons people have marked their body? I mean, there's going to be magic slash health, religious, sexual, military. Like what in your experience and your research has shown you to be the drivers? Yeah, I mean, I sort of, I find in a way, you know, there are as many kind of reasons as there are individual peoples and individual cultures.

So, I mean, I try and, so most of my research is on kind of contemporary or modern Western tattooing, which doesn't really exist in kind of a normative set of social structures. So we haven't, one of the things we haven't really had in Britain is a kind of, you know, culturally sanctioned tattoo practice. in Britain is a kind of culturally sanctioned tattoo practice. In places where those practices do exist, there are all kinds of things. They mark gender, they mark status and power, they mark... Sometimes they're punitive, actually, and kind of stigmatising. They are sometimes magical.

They are sometimes actually just decorative and just performative. So different cultures around the world have used this technology this basic technology of skin marking for different different reasons um and i find that a really interesting thing that i always try and kind of communicate which is that you know tattooing is a medium not a phenomenon so i can get asked by anthropologists you know like to talk about uh i don't know some or one tattooing or something and it's like well i can tell you about you know it very basically but actually just because it's using the same technology as the things that i'm an expert in doesn't mean they're the same thing and it would be it would be like someone who is an expert on like da vinci who was talking about

the last supper being asked to talk about cave painting just because it's paint on a wall you know so i'm really kind of interested in trying in trying to sort of find a way of saying, yeah, tattooing is a medium, it's a way of making marks on the skin, but all tattoos are not the same. And actually, there are kind of good historical and art historical ways of disambiguating those things, which to anthropologists look like the same phenomenon, you know. In that case, that makes so much sense.

In that case, let's talk about some of the areas that you've researched. And it's really interesting that you state that. In kind of Northwestern European culture, there's never been an elite sanctioned, or, you know, way of marking a body. So our dads, our granddads would be like, we're getting all our daddies.

It's always been a bit transgressive. Or has it? Well, yeah, so, I mean, that's also one of the kind of myths I always want to work against a little bit. So, I mean, really kind of a good example is late 16th century. We encountered, and this is also a bust of cook myth a bit, we encountered tattooed people in North America, right? Lots of tattooing happening in Florida and in Virginia and stuff.

And so John White did some watercolours, Lots of tattooing happening in Florida and in Virginia and stuff. And so John White did some watercolours. They were published in English with engravings by Theodore Debris. It was like, look at these weird people that we've just discovered. But really interestingly, those watercolours and those engravings of those watercolours were published alongside these sort of fantastic imagined images of the Picts, basically saying oh you think these people are really weird and strange and savage

don't worry our ancestors were weird too right, and now those images of the Picts are actually pretty fabulous they're kind of drawn on Roman sources that were themselves kind of centuries of sort of you know confabulation the pics actually the ancient Britons probably weren't tattooed ironically it seems that they

were actually using body paint but the Romans certainly thought that the ancient Britons were tattooed and so the antiquarians in the 16th century certainly thought that Britons were tattooed and so actually this this first kind of moment when like modern Britain in the early modern period is starting to think about tattooing, it's in a kind of like quite humanistic way of like, hey, you know, everyone does tattoos. These people aren't weird. These people aren't strange. And very, very quickly, so right at the beginning of the 17th century, we start finding in pilgrim accounts, particularly to the Holy Lands. So European tourists and pilgrims who go to the Holy Lands start getting tattooed in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, in Nazareth, and coming back with like, I mean, essentially what looked like David Beckham's sleeves, right, full kind of designs

of Jesus on the cross and marks of their saints and the year they went, you know, like kind of as if you went to Magaluf, you know, 1999. But yeah, so the kind of real early modern kind of contemporary history of tattooing in Britain begins actually with upper class, wealthy, religious, pious people. In our exhibition, we've got a reproduction of an image of a guy who was the ambassador to the court of St James, a Danish ambassador to England, and he's got his sleeve rolled up and he's got a big pilgrim tattoo on display of Christ crucified and a 1660s-odd date to show his pOT and his kind of commitment. So, so yeah, this, this kind of idea that,

you know, not just for sailors anymore is, is something that, again, I think I'm, I'm, I'm working against all the time. And then how, so, so that, I mean, that's, that's very, that's brilliant. I love that. It's very surprising. So where, and where does, where does body art go? Where does tattooing go in Britain from there? Yeah, so we've got... You have to look pretty hard, but we can find records of tattooing really unbroken. Some of the historians that have written about the Cook myth idea, when they realised there was this kind of, you know, 100 years earlier there was this pilgrim Christian tattooing.

They sort of said, oh, it must have been forgotten. You know, it's come back with the Pacific voyages. But of course, like, you know, that doesn't really make any sense. We've actually got pretty good records of people getting tattooed in London in the 1740s. And when you say records, that's fascinating. Are we talking evidence of the parlours, or just evidence in letters and diaries of individuals who've gone through it? Yeah, so it's difficult to unpick this, actually, because one of the things we don't

have before the Cook voyage is the word tattoo. So that is something that we import from the Pacific. Or at least the word tattoo meaning tattooing, meaning skin marking. So it's quite difficult to find these accounts but for example there's an account in the Newcastle Courant of a young rogue about 15 years of age who on his breast had a scene of two men having a gun duel and his shirt billowed open at court and they were all really shocked about how this um by some manner made indelible this image of uh of a pistol musket fight on his whole chest um so things like that we've there's one uh in there's a couple actually of in the slave um uh or the colonial newspapers in the colonies in america from the 1740s where people are often writing about

their slaves saying, hey, my slaves run away, here's how you can find them. And occasionally it's like, oh, my cook's run away, he's an Englishman, look out for him, he's got Adam and Eve marked on his arm. And they use words like marked or stained or pricked because there's not one single word for tattooing. I mean, during and after the Napoleonic Wars, there's like, you know, tattooing is pretty kind of sailor-focused, let's say. Although, basically, even by the middle of the 19th century, we're starting to see, for example, tales like that of Roger Tichborne. Do you know his story incredible tale so 1853

uh this um guy called sir roger tichborne he's like the young scion of a fairly like wealthy family and his ship uh sinks the ship he's on sinks at sea uh on the way to brazil and like no trace is found of it and he's lost but But his mother kind of never gives up hope that he's going to be found. And eventually she advertises all over the world to say, have you seen my lost son? Was he rescued? Did he wash up somewhere? And it turns out he's in Australia, right? And so he comes back to England.

The mother is so happy to have found him alive. And then very shortly after his return, she dies. And he's then set to inherit the family fortune. The other members of the family are like, he's putting a bit of weight. He doesn't quite, is he our brother, cousin? What's going on? and so it comes to trial and there's this amazing kind of in 1871 there's this like hair stopping moment captivating the nation when the judge basically says like we've got witnesses to attest that sir roger this

aristocratic scion has tattoos can you show us if you've got tattoos please and he obviously hasn't got and it turns out that he's a butcher's son from Wapping called Tom Castro, who was trying his luck. And that then kind of, you know, so Roger had been tattooed at boarding school. So he'd been tattooing, him and his friends had tattooed each other

intimately at boarding school. And he'd also been tattooed on holiday in France. And... Wonderful, that's the 18th century. And that's the early 19th century. at boarding school and he'd also been tattooed on holiday in France and wonderful that's the 18th century that's the early 19th century yeah

so that is what's great about that is that you your colleagues must just send you these little because you can't I mean you wouldn't look at that case

necessarily no so you must get these little emails going hey check this out that was I mean that case is quite well known I think in a way

that's a kind of that has become such a kind of amazing moment where literally loads of people have right like loads of lords are writing to the times and saying well i suggest that we all get our sons tattooed right so that in a way i think leads on to what happens next which is the the professional era which follows in the wake of it but yeah i did there was one on twitter actually which was amazing because obviously a lot of people who are historians of other areas don't know that these histories

are a bit patchy before the 19th century so one there was a guy on Twitter who I was following I forget his name actually excuse me but he was a historian

of the Spanish Inquisition and he was looking at some Inquisition records from the yeah early 18th century and he's like oh look at this

there's this amazing story of this this guy who's been brought before the In century. And he's like, oh, look at this. There's this amazing story of this guy who's been brought before the Inquisition because he's got a tattoo of Jesus and he's written cock underneath it. And he's in trouble with the Inquisition because he's got a blasphemous tattoo. And of course, this guy didn't realise that, you know,

any tattoos prior to the 1760s are really interesting. Yeah, manna from heaven for you. Yeah it's like so that that was i was writing a chapter of my long forthcoming long delayed book at the time and that was i think the quickest from like you know publication to to sight sighting and i literally was it was in a footnote in about 10 minutes it was great um yeah so and i'm i'm really grateful to people friends of mine who work on all kinds of other things because yeah when they find tattoo stuff, they send them to me. And things that you wouldn't necessarily find otherwise. So let's talk about the aristocratic case in the UK.

So that does lead to a kind of popularisation of tattoos, even amongst different classes of people to the ones that we might associate. Yeah, so I think two things happen basically around the same time so that case is you know in 1871 about a decade earlier in 1862 um Bertie and the future Edward VII went to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage he got sort of sent off after Albert died to kind of grow up a bit right um Victoria kind of you know sent him off uh to to to get out of her hair basically and grow up and after a bit of time pissing around in in America he he went to Jerusalem he got tattooed in Jerusalem he got a pilgrimage tattoo in fact he got a Jerusalem cross which is this kind of big cross symbolizing Jerusalem with four crosses around it symbolizing Christianity spreading around the world

and he got that done spreading around the world. And he got that done in 18... Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our

special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week 1962 april the first or second i think and um it didn't become public knowledge until later on, but basically he told his family, of course. And in 1881, future King George V and his brother, Prince Albert Victor, they got tattooed in Japan, which is another part of the story we can maybe come to. But basically they were like, oh yeah, we're going to get tattooed by a Japanese person.

And then they got tattooed by the same man as Papa. And then that becomes a huge news story very, very quickly. And so I think by the early 1880s, there's essentially this idea in the public imagination that actually tattooing is a kind of thing that all the upper class folk are doing. There's a few other things that happen around the same time. There's a great one that happens in America where there's a woman who'd been tattooed, a young kind of, again, debutante,

had been tattooed on her knee, and her dad, she'd run away with her boyfriend to America, and her dad put adverts in the American press saying, like, I don't know if you've seen my daughter, by the way, she's got a tattoo on her knee. So all of the American socialites are like, oh, is this what posh girls in England are doing? Let's go and... And that's, again, like the 1870s. So let's go and let's figure out this must be a nice posh thing to do.

There was a great story about George V as well, though, because before he did get tattooed in Japan, the story sort of came back that he'd been tattooed him and his brother had both been tattooed on the end of their noses with anchors and there was the caricatures in the press that the two royal princes had had their faces tattooed and their kind of ed de comp a guy called charles beresford who himself actually was tattooed but he he wrote back to the queen and said don't worry i haven't let them get tattooed it's fine and then about yeah a couple of months later they ended up getting you know

george obviously got a dragon and um albert victor got some stalks done in japan yeah so that that kind of public that posh authorization is what i think you know starts making it possible for tattooists to make a living as tattooists. Because before that, really, most tattooing had been kind of intimate and between close-knit communities. And then into the 20th century, the association of tattoo with kind of marginalised, excluded groups within society, that it was a sort a subculture.

Is that accurate? Well, so one of the things I collect as a tattoo historian, and I sort of invite your listeners to look out for them now, because every time there's a story about tattooing, it's still the cliche of, yeah, oh, we used to think that only sailors got tattooed, or tattooing used to be just for sailors or bikers or ruffians, and now, like, look who's getting tattooed,

and, oh, my God, women are getting tattooed, would you believe? I've got examples of that headline from every decade from 1880. Is that right? Is that right? How interesting. It's constantly this new thing and constantly this surprising thing, but actually what's really surprising is how little things have changed. Yeah, because I'm, anecdotally, because I remember everyone telling me now that everyone's getting ink done. I remember as a kid in the 80s there were lots of people walking around with tattoos. It was very common indeed.

There's a great one of those from a magazine in London in 1981, so the year after I was born, that was like, if you think that tattooing is just for like Victorian freak shows and Sleazy, you know flop houses or something you're out of date because everyone's doing it now and including lecturers You know, so I'm like, okay How can it be so odd that it can be that pervasive? Yeah, well I think what it is and of course like we do have more tattooing now like there is so there is a there is Definitely more tattooing happening now than ever but it's not there's no point where it like goes away like there's no kind of break point there's no separation between the then and the now and i think one of the reasons why this these myths build up actually is because if you think about where people get tattooed and how they get

tattooed most tattooing is um not visible right in day-to-day life so for example like there's no photographs uh that i've found of uh george the fifth or edward the seventh tattoos because it's because they're not they're not going around rolling their sleeves up right um after the second world war which is i think the period of you know our our parents um there was lots of tattooing because lots of people were tattooed in the war including lots of officers um i have i have a theory that i haven't proved it that the captain of the submarine fleet had a tattoo on the back of his neck george creasy because it's on his sculptural bust there's a there's a um dragon fighting there's a sort of george fighting a a Nazi dragon on the back of his sculptural bust. Anyway, lots of officers getting tattooed during the Second World War,

but of course, like, after the war, the tattoos that are visible are not on the people that are in professions, they're on people that are digging the roads. So we, this association with, like, the kind of people that have tattoos is really a kind of visibility problem, basically, kind of people that have tattoos is really a kind of visibility problem basically largely so in the 1930s early 1930s woman called edie marchioness of londonderry she'd been tattooed in japan so japan had been closed off for the west for you know centuries opened up uh in 1858 one of the things that western travelers were really enamored by in japan was tattooing and in fact tattooing is a part of that big moment of japonism not really written about by anyone that's ever written about this before but i like very straightforwardly the same designs that people are putting on their

textiles and on their silverware and on their you know ceramics are the same things that tattooists in britain and france and america are using as tattoo flash um so big booming tattooing in japan in fact, English language guide books to Japan advertised the best tattooists to go to, hotels had in-house tattooists, there was also in-house tattooists in curio shops. Lots of tattooing happening in Japan. But of course, if you're a woman and you're getting tattooed in like 1900, you're not showing your legs off, right? But by 1930 when the skirt heights had come up, everyone's like, when did you get that whacking great dragon on your leg?

And she was like, I've had it half my life by this point, but you've never seen it before because... and all of a sudden then it stopped. Again, new trend everyone, oh my god, all these these posh people have got, you know, crazy tattoos. So, I think actually the story of tattooing is always new trend everyone oh my god all these these posh people have got you know crazy tattoos so um i think actually the story of tattooing is is always a more nuanced i think you know it would be wrong to say tattooing in general isn't skewed historically a bit more male and probably towards the lower end of the class spectrum but it's always been more diverse than that and particularly you know tattooing is quite expensive so the kind of like large-scale you know what I might call you know what I want to think

about kind of what tattooers you think about themselves as artists let's say sort of call themselves artists they're always really at least having a decent proportion of their client base who are pretty well off. So yeah, bringing it up to the present, what are the, are there cultures within tattooing now? Like, you know, do people, because I've got a friend who says,

God, everyone's getting a tattoo. Everyone has a little thing on their ankle and they gap you, it's really annoying because I'm actually someone who thinks. Because I'm cool. I'm cool, yeah. Is that something you see in the past as well? Oh, absolutely. So the first professional tattooer in London,

probably really the first kind of high-end pro tattooer in the whole country, a guy called Sutherland MacDonald, who was tattooing in the Hammam Turkish Baths in German Street. Very high-end client base, presented himself in a very high-end way. In 1886 or 7, maybe slightly later than that, but certainly in the first decade of his career, certainly before 1895, he's saying, like, I mean, tattooing is just, I mean, it's just too trendy now. Like, it's far too trendy. There's a great one from America in the 1920s as well, Vanity Fair,

where Vanity Fair say, and it's one of my favourite examples of this cliche, where they say, 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. Right, 1926. And they interview an old salt tattooer there, and he's like, I'm an artist. I have it in me to do this beautiful artwork. And all kids today want is diving girls. Far too trendy. 1926.

Yeah. So, yeah, I find that, I mean, funny and comforting and hilarious and strange all at the same time. Well, you have relieved me of so many myths today. It's been absolutely enlightening. Would you be happy to talk a little bit about the ink that you've got? Sure. How do you go about choosing?

Are them historically themed or inspired? Yeah, some of my pieces were done off the back of works by some of the artists that I'm writing about. Some were taken from historic flash sheets. I mean, I got into tattooing in a very weird way. So my great-grand grandma was tattooed. So she'd been tattooed about, again about the turn of the century because her brother came home one day with a tattoo machine that

I have since found out slash speculated was probably bought from a department store. That's another bit of tattoo history that no one knows.ma G's in Holborn around the corner from here was selling initially as electrical novelties and then a bit more clearly as professional tools tattoo machines over the counter in the middle of London 120 years ago so somehow my great uncle

got a tattoo machine came home to my great grandma and said can I tattoo you little sister she said will it come off? He said, yes. Oh, no. Yeah. So she had apparently ED, Ethelwyn Darby, on her, it was her initials, on her arm. That could have gone a lot worse.

Could have gone a lot worse. Holy. And my granddad used to tell me that he was a submariner in the Dutch Navy, and he woke up in a tattooist's chair in Jakarta as they're about to tattoo a fly on the end of his nose Oh god don't be silly. And he woke up just in time. And he woke up just in time. Lads, boys, oh you know it's all part of the fun. They're out drinking. Oh yeah very funny. So I've got a fly tattoo, not on the end of my nose, but like that was slightly, I mean almost certainly to my granddad's eternal horror.

You can hear him rotating in his grave right now I mean a lot of my tattoos are historically based on some of the research, a lot of it now when you get past the first couple it becomes a lot less of a big deal, so a lot of my

works now are quite spontaneous, I'm getting works from friends of mine, pieces of art that i really like and things by friends of mine are you full up my back's pretty empty actually it's my last big spot because i i sort of ran out of money because i was doing a phd um so i i've still got um a big space for a pretty nice big back piece so that's the that's going to be the final kind of cherry. And I've always got little gaps here and there. So, I mean, presumably you're covered underneath that. Well, very embarrassingly, I'm not,

because I'm just such a... I grew up in a very pathetically retro... Hang on, what's the word I'm looking for? No, I grew up in a... Reactionary. I grew up in a pathetically reactionary culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Straight white guy.

Yeah. You know, I mean, it's pathetic, really. A child of privilege who doesn't have any goddamn ink. I just, I've just always, I've never been confident enough that I'd, it's not, I've just never been confident enough I'd like something for long enough. Yeah. Well, I always say to that, you know, as a historian, you understand that, for example, the same pictures have hung on the wall of like,

you know, the National Gallery for 200 years you know you yeah just just pick just pick well commission commission well yeah and i ain't got i ain't got 200 years left in me quickly tell me about this amazing exhibition which is proving a huge success tour in the country yeah thank you so it's called british tattoo art revealed it's 400 years of british tattoo history um starting in about 1600 to the present loads of incredible commissioned work by loads of new artists as well as some amazing unseen stuff from private collections that chart the history it began at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth in 2017 it's now in Yarmouth at Time and Tide from October

October 2019 until March 2020 immediately after that it's going to Chatham Dockyard in Kent until I think like late that summer

and you're very modest but I'll tell everyone you've had record numbers of people going to see it so well done you yeah thank you very much and you're very active on Twitter

what are you on Twitter? at Matt Lodder so I'm at the University of Essex so look me up there yeah at Matt Lodder on Twitter Semaph the University of Essex so look me up there yeah at Matt Lodder on Twitter

Semaphore Carrier Pigeon book coming out soon book coming eventually come back on the pod yeah thank you thank you very much

thanks Dan cheers One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review.

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