Dan Snow's History Hit - Tattoos

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

There are many common misconceptions and misunderstandings about Tattoos. They can act as a window into the social economic and cultural issues of a period of time. Britain was in fact the 'land of the painted people' with tattooing going further back into our history than many people would think. Dr Matt Lodder, the world's leading expert on the history of tattooing, and senior lecturer in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex talks to Dan about all things ink and body art. What do tattoos mean for us as individuals and what can they tell us about societies of the past? This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We're talking tattoos, we're talking ink, body art, and I've got one of my favourite guests on, Dr Matt Lodder. He's a senior lecturer in art history and theory at the University of Essex. He teaches art history, but he also is the world's leading expert on the history of tattooing. He had a great travelling exhibition, it was at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth and it toured nationwide. You may have had him come on the pod years ago now talking about that exhibition.

Well, now he's got the book out, Painted People, and he chooses people that have been tattooed from our past, from history, to tell us more about tattoos, what they mean, what they mean for us individuals, and what they seem to mean more broadly,

what they mean within a society and between different societies. It's interesting stuff this, you're going to love it. And so enjoy this podcast with someone who you won't be able to see is heavily tattooed. Here's Matt Loder. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Matt, great to have you back on the pod, buddy. Hello, how are you doing? Very good indeed. Very good indeed.

And, you know, since we last talked a couple of years ago now inking is becoming more and more popular right? I mean is it right to say more and more mainstream? There was a YouGov survey over the summer which basically made the claim that about 26% of Britons have tattoos but like the most interesting thing on that for me was younger people are less tolerant of tattoos in the workplace and tattooing in general than people who are between 25 and 55. Yeah, the youths, they're getting quite conservative, Dan. Yeah, some of them don't drink, man. That's the thing that I found out the other day. I know. It's a good proxy for my general theory that through tattoo history,

you can track a lot of other things. And I think it was so interesting to me as someone who tracks these cliches of, you know, over 140 years worth of newspaper headlines saying that tattooing is the hot new thing and everyone's doing it now. But finally, I've got some empirical evidence that tattooing is definitely uncool again, at least if you're a Gen Z-er. Because you and I have talked before and you blew my mind, you know, I grew up in one of the, I guess, in one of the lulls between tattoo acceptance. The 80s, it was seen as tattoos were kind of degenerate. And yet that's why you blew my mind. We talked before. I mean, it was not just mainstream, it was sort of de rigueur for the elite the world king emperors having tattoos describe that period of history to me yeah well you know

the only reason we have a kind of tattoo industry right so the kind of place where you can walk in off the street and pay someone money a stranger you've never met to tattoo you like the only reason that is profitable or you know can exist as a business is because in the 19th century all of a sudden posh people wanting to get tattooed, right? So, you know, we have huge long histories of tattooing, most of it in Europe and America in the kind of intimate sense, you know, people tattooing their friends in prisons and on ships and things like that, or tattooing themselves or their boyfriends and girlfriends.

But the idea that you can walk in and pay for tattooing kind of exists because rich people decide they want to get tattooed and all of a sudden you can be a tattooist you know that's from in the UK at least from the 1880s onwards everyone wants to be like George V basically George V was tattooed in Japan in 1881 it's very very famous it's part of his souvenir pullout of his marriage to Mary of Tech he's like scenes from his life one of them is his tattoo experience and so off the back of that one of them is his tattoo experience and so off the back of that yeah everyone wants to get tattooed and all of a sudden there's a business in the posh parts of London in German Street and in the West End where you can go and get nice

fancy tattoos and show them off to your mates down the club. Is that because tattooing is this part of Britain and Europe's engagement with the wider world? I mean, is tattooing something that was more prevalent outside Europe? Was it a new thing? Was it an excitement? Whereas in, say, the South Pacific, it would have been more common if we go back to the early modern period? The idea always has been, or certainly in recent decades and centuries, that tattooing sort of came to Europe from elsewhere, that it's not a European European thing and tattooing is a good way of demarcating one culture from another I called my book sorry to get a plug in earlier I called my new book Painted People because that is the

label that plenty of places have given to their neighbours or to even subcultures within their own societies of people who were tattooed so So the Arapaho, for example, in Native North America were called by their rivals, the painted people. The Ainu in Japan were called the painted people. There were kind of discussions of painted people in ancient China. At least one of the theories, I think probably the best theory for the name of the country we live in, Britain, is that it means something like land of the painted people. So tattooing is always a good way of kind of demarcating one place from another, right?

And in the beginning of the kind of age of empires, you know, in the immediate encounter with the Americas, tattooing was actually this thing that connected us to the new world. It was like, hey, these weird people we're finding on the eastern seaboard of this new continent happen to have tattoos. ancestors had tattoos turns out you know they're just like us tattooing was a way of actually connecting the new world to the old but by the time we get to yeah the early modern period and the encounters in the pacific so from the middle of the 18th

century onwards i suppose tattooing by that point is a way of saying, hey, these people are different to us, they are savage, they are kind of atavistic, and they deserve to be conquered and colonised. And so very, very quickly, certainly by the first decades of the 19th century, this idea had embedded itself that tattooing was something that was entirely unknown in European culture, even though there was a portrait of a tattooed woman hanging in the Royal Academy in the months before Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti for the first time. This is kind of a narrative, right? Tattoos get to be a useful narrative device of dividing one person from another or one subculture for another or one race for another in some senses. But actually, tattoos are pretty much always everywhere.

And specifically to answer the 19th century question, the reason we have this kind of boom and an industry is to do with kind of exoticism. It's to do with Japan. So Japan was closed off to the West for 250 years. All of a sudden it's opened up to the West and everything Japanese is trendy, right? People are getting Japanese furniture for their homes, they're getting ceramicware and silverware, and the kind of coolest, most authentic, most real Japanese art you could get was to get a Japanese tattoo.

And yeah, and it was basically people coming back from Japan and going to their mates in London and New York and Paris, like, hey, check out my cool tattoo, I got it done in Yokohama, that basically made people who weren't going to Yokohama or Nagasaki or Tokyo anytime soon trying to find people to do it for them and yeah therefore we have an industry basically. Your new book which I'm really happy to see a copy of it's brilliant you do talk about tattooing having always been here among us and you go all the way

back to pre-history and I'd like to ask about Oatsy the Iceman first of all he had tattoos are they done in the similar way that we would do tattoos today like is tattooing as a art form as a craft is that quite consistent? So you don't need much to do a tattoo other than something sharp and something to make some ink out of and that is usually although not exclusively carbon black basically from fires so the technology essentially is make a wound in your skin find a way of leaving some ink particles in it the specific way of making the wounds do vary actually there's some really really interesting quite hardcore archaeology happening at the moment with arguments using new imaging techniques about how Otzi was tattooed the current thesis for his tattooing actually was that his skin was opened up

with a kind of blade ink rubbed in, because all of his tattoos are kind of like tally marks, basically, or little crosses. So he dates from about 5,500 years ago, so copper age, basically, early Bronze Age. He was found in the 90s in the Austro-Italian Alps. He's the only one of his culture that has been discovered or at least preserved in that way. So we don't know whether he was the cool-toed guy in town or whether that was somehow indicative of some wider habit. But from him, we have that kind of practice, but there's also vertical ways of making marks. So either with tiny little sewing needle groupings or things that would look like a pen downwards some tattoo traditions which are bigger for example in samoa

and new zealand use a kind of needle grouping on the end of a hafted handle and you tap it with a hammer or a little mallet and it would kind of go in fact we get the word tattoo from tahiti because it's like tattoo tattoo tattoo and then there are some other kind of really quite fact we get the word tattoo from Tahiti because it's like tattoo tattoo tattoo and then there are some other kind of really quite esoteric ways of doing it the most interesting of which is from the arctic so tattooing in the arctic is done by sewing or basting more technically coating a sort of string or a thread of sinew with an oil-based ink and then threading it through the skin, pulling the ink through and leaving this kind of dot dash pattern. But basically, yeah, you just need a way

of kind of opening up the skin to the right layer, which is essentially the middle layer and then leaving some kind of pigment in it. You can even do it accidentally. Lots of sailors get things like powder burn marks. You know, if they're holding a musket or a cannon goes off and it fires some unburned powder into their skin and it leaves a wound sometimes that can heal and leave a powder burn mark and so you know there's this kind of unintentional ways of doing

it as well the interesting thing about i love about those powder burn marks is that recently some poor people who were mucking around with homemade explosives end up with powder burn marks and some well-meaning surgeons thought they'd try and remove it with a laser, right, which is how you get rid of tattoo ink. And some of these particles were unexploded bits of gunpowder and were going off under their skin when they fired lasers at them to try and remove them. So if you've got a powder burn tattoo, probably best to leave it alone. Crikey. That sounds brutal. Probably best to leave it alone. Crikey, that sounds brutal.

So, Oatsy, how significant were his tattoos? Were they as wide-ranging as yours, buddy, or were they just little bits and bobs? So he's fascinating, right? So he's currently the oldest authenticated, preserved human specimen with tattoos that we have. There are some from Egypt that are around the same age, and in fact some new research is likely, I think, to slightly make those specimens a bit older than Otzi. But at the moment, as far as the published literature is concerned, Otzi is the oldest we've got. And his tattoos are, as I said, these kind of tally marks or crosses. And the general theory is that they're in some way kind of medico-magical.

So they're on parts of his body where he had things like degenerative arthritis and things like that. There was some on his chest, which don't seem to fit into that pattern, but potentially he had some lung condition or something. And we don't know whether the tattoo was a kind of thought to be itself curative, or maybe it was intended to be part of a kind of ritualistic system. Maybe the practice itself of putting ink in the skin was thought to ease pain because it would certainly kick your endorphins in. We don't really know, but he's pretty much covered. It's likely that he was tattooed not by himself

because although most of his tattoos are in places where he could have done them himself if he was right-handed, there's one on his lower back, which is much neater than it would be if you tried to tattoo your own lower back. And again, with microscopic analysis of the pigment particles that are still in the skin after five and a half thousand years, you can tell that it's more than one iteration. So he was tattooed on more than one occasion over the course of his life. But as I said, he's really the only person from his culture that has been discovered. And so we don't know how widespread or how indicative his tattooing was of anything wider than just him, you know.

He could have been the cool academic. He could have been the Matt Loder of the era. While the losers like me sat around with like pale, pasty, unblemished, well, sadly blemished, but like un-arted skin. And he could have been the you. This is the real problem we're having, actually. And it's a real big debate amongst archaeologists of this stuff, of which I am not. My job is to sort of try and put it into a bigger context,

but there are some amazing specialists working on this stuff across the different regions of the world. But there are big discussions in places like Egypt. So Egypt's another good example where there's actually a few more mummies that are tattooed from ancient Egypt, but not that many, less than kind of 20 or so. And you can start to kind of argue for some kind of visual symbolism. The images in those tattoos, particularly the later

ones, tend to match the kind of images that are on other things like pots and pieces of rock art and things like that. But at the same time, we don't know if these were just cool kids hanging out and getting tattoosed the instinct and this has been the case for a long time in archaeology is to kind of you know well it's symbolic it must have some kind of meaning and if you start from that premise you end up finding plausible accounts of what these might have mean or symbolize there are some academics actually who are saying look just because two people today have got the same tattoo doesn't mean they're in the same gang or they're the same tribe. Why are we assuming that was the

case in ancient Egypt, you know? And like, I'll leave that as a conversation for the etiologists to have, but I think it kind of indicates the kind of problems we have with dealing with an art form that doesn't really last much longer in the skin than it takes to decompose. You listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about tattooing. More coming up. Why were medieval priests so worried that women were going to seduce men with fish that they'd kept in their pants? Who was the first gay activist?

And what on earth does the expression sneezing in the cabbage mean? I'll tell you, it's not a cookery technique, that's for sure. Join me, Kate Lister, on Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society. A podcast where we will be bed hopping throughout time and civilisation to bring you the quirkiest and kinkiest stories from history. What more could you possibly want? Listen to Betwixt the Sheets today wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I mean, it's a nightmare, isn't it? You and I have chatted about this so often, like it may mean something. It may mean everything. Like the SS tattoo on their arm, you know, that's intense and it represents a kind of adherence to a team,

an idea for which they would happily die. But it may also mean nothing. My cousin got an Islamic symbol tattooed on his ankle and he lives in Ontario and he's not Islamic in any way. He's not even Islamic-curious particularly. How can you work this stuff out? It's really interesting. Yeah, and I think this is one of the things that new generations of scholarship that is being done by people like me who are tattooed and you have a different set of preconceptions we can never answer these questions exactly but we can insert doubt in the right places and I think that is

super interesting another really good example of that also from ancient Egypt is about because most of the tattooed mummies that were found were women up until very recently. And of course, what kind of women get tattoos, Dan? Loose women get tattoos, right? Oh yeah, definitely, of course. And so the assumption was for a long time, oh, these female mummies must have been concubines or sex workers or some kind of harem for the pharaoh. And as more of these artifacts are discovered, as more careful scholarship is done, it turns out that, surprise, surprise, Dan, just because these women have tattoos doesn't mean that they were prostitutes. Not that it would be bad if they were necessarily,

but you know what I mean? Like, it's really interesting that modern perceptions about tattooing and who gets them and why have sort of clouded scholarship all the way back to even things like ancient Egyptian examples. I want to hear about another character from your book in a second, but I also want to tell people what fun it is to be your friend, because you've said that when historians specialise in things like tattoos that don't often appear carefully indexed in archives,

if you like the Seven Years' War, then you can know where to go in the national archives to find those boxes and you've told me in the past i've sent you one or two bits like when your colleagues and friends are accidentally looking into the battle of trafalgar or the wall street crash they will accidentally find tattoos there's otherwise no way of finding these things right that um the metadata kind of isn't there if you like and so you get these great emails from people just going, oh, weird, I've found something for you here. You know, this is a cool portrait or a random... Yeah, and sometimes it's literally,

I've got this preserved human arm in my cupboard, as was one email I got a few years ago. Conversely as well, right? Like I'm having a conversation with a really interesting early modernist at the moment who had read a story of a pilgrimage tattoo that was very early and she was interested in the religious history and the kind of print history and she was like oh this is really interesting and I had to tell her that the source was unreliable and I'd done some work on it from a tattoo history point of view and put it into some different contexts and so tattoo history because it is the history of not exclusively but

often the kind of people who are not particularly well represented in historical narratives, tattoo history can speak back to those bigger histories and start broadening and complicating those stories as well, you know? Most defo. Now tell me about the early modern that I was really interested in this, I can't even pronounce this person, but I was really interested in this 18th century tattooed person,

because I love that period. Mikak. Yeah, so she is the person whose portrait was hanging in the in the royal academy i love her example because she's like the final nail if a nail was needed in the idea that captain cook discovered tattooing because she was brought to london from what is now baffin island on the eastern seaboard of the americas in modern day canada she was bought basically essentially having been captured during a massacre but bought on a kind of trade mission or on a sort

of diplomatic mission to sort of show off in london by hugh palliser who was the governor of the colony to show off the kind of good work that was being done and just how civilisable these Inuit were. Because Mikak was very intelligent, she learned to speak English, and the idea was bring her to England, show her how great it is here, and then when she goes back she can tell all of her friends and family how generous we have been to her and maybe they'll stop raiding our fishing parties. It's a very cynical move. There's a big kind of integration with the Moravian mission at the time as well and the Moravians are very keen to convert Inuit to Christianity and so go quite deep inland and start engaging so anyway they bring Mekak to London and she arrives essentially about two months I think if I'm right off the top of my head, before Captain Cook arrives in Tahiti.

She's painted by John Russell, the Royal Academy mission portrait painter, very grumpy guy. I went to look at his diaries because I thought I might find some effusive account of painting this strange tattooed woman. But he was a really, really miserable dude. So it was like a teenage boy diary of just how awful it was and how melancholy he was feeling and how sad he was. He was a very sad boy, was John Russell. And all he says about meeting Mikak, this woman from the New World, is that he was sad that she wouldn't speak English to him because he couldn't proselytise Jesus to her. And actually, some of the Moravians who write about their encounter with her say she could speak English perfectly fine. And actually, some of the Moravians who write about their encounters with her say she could speak English perfectly fine.

And actually, she was quite interested in Christian theology, at least by their account. So I think probably he was just a miserable bastard and he didn't want to speak to her. He did this portrait of her that was hung in the first ever Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the summer of 1769. And so she's hanging in the centre of London in high society. It's presented to the Queen. It's written about in the newspapers, literally the minute that Captain Cook sets foot in Tahiti for the first time to supposedly discover tattooing. I had to ask myself, really, why was it that this story that tattooing was discovered in the Pacific became so prevalent when stories like Me Cucks and examples of Americans, both from Native Americans in the Pacific became so prevalent when stories like Mikak's and examples of Americans, both from

Native Americans in the North American continent and from modern day Canada up in the Arctic Circle. Why were those stories so forgotten? And of course, like, it's not a story of forgetting, right? It's a story of active effacement, because I think what Mikak and her tattoos show is the kind of limits of that colonial mission. There was a slightly later example as well. Another woman who was brought a few years later and shown to Joseph Banks, science officer, her name was Kalbvik. Her portrait has the facial tattoos painted out.

Because I think if you're trying to show that you're doing this great job of Christianising the new world, having these people who are, you know, the Inuit were generally very interested in Christianity. They have a quite syncretic approach to religious belief, but they carried on living their old ways, of course, like hunting and fishing and tattooing. And so those facial tattoos were kind of an embarrassment. They were kind of illustration, I think, of the limits of the colonial project of that kind. And her life story is super interesting. It ends in a bit of sadness because her husband runs off with her sister.

But that whole story of a tattooed woman in the middle of London high society has pretty much been erased from the popular memory. One last thing I think is really funny about that. As I said, we get the word tattoo from Cook from those voyages. But of course the kind of marks on mika's face have a particular term it's called kakini week i think is how you

pronounce it but there's other terms in the inuit language communities for different ways of tattooing something like 19th century anthropologists are writing about this practice they sort of bastardize that and call it kakini And so I sort of wish that rather than tattooing, we were talking about cackeening because it would be at least a bit more historically long term. But here we are. Tell me about the cackeening of Joe Carstairs. There's a person that we've forgotten to remember. I was fascinated by them. The first thing to say is how do we talk about Joe? I think as I go within the book book i'm going to go with female pronouns because that's what she used in her life and her biographers did too but she took a male name she was born in the latter part of the 19th century she was a

granddaughter of the treasurer of the standard oil corporation and she was basically one of the wealthiest women in the world in the run-up to World War I. And basically said, like, I don't want to be a girl. She literally said, I came out of the womb queer in that kind of 19th, 30th, 20th century way. Took on this male name, Joe. Marion was her born name. But she was cutting her hair short. She was wearing male clothing.

She was smoking cigarettes, licking her hair. She was having outrageous sex with Marlena Dietrich, for example. She became a professional powerboat racer, because you can do that when you're a wealthy socialite. She had the world's water speed record on powerboating. She eventually had bought an island in the Bahamas and had a private army. But particular she was tattooed and getting tattooed in the kind of sailor fashion basically of the 1930s was a way of kind of creating or embedding this gender identity really weirdly and interestingly one of her stepfathers her mother was married a few times one of her stepfathers was a guy called Serge Voronov who was one of these guys

in the early part in the 1920s he was experimenting with injecting like the testicular pulp of animals into people to give them virility there was a guy in the US called John Brinkley but Voronov was doing it with monkey testicles Brinkley was using goats and so it's kind of interesting that at this time when gender is a real area of scientific, social conversation, a time when it turns out that if you can inject monkey testicles into people and they become more manly, maybe manliness or masculinity is not some innate thing that we have, but something that we can create either through medical or social means. through medical or social means. Jo was out there going, yeah, I'm going to get tattooed. I'm going to get badass sailor tattoos on my arms. She got tattooed in Hawaii by a naval tattooer.

She walked around with her sleeves rolled up, smoking fags, and with this palm tree hula girl on one arm and a snake on the other arm. There were other tattooed women around at the time who were kind of getting into very delicate delicate very artistic stuff but she was like no i want to have these badass sailor tattoos and all of the um newspapers that write about her don't quite know how to talk about her they used kind of lots of weird adjectives like she was striking and if you look at photos of her both in her 20s and 30s and when she gets a bit older she's just a remarkable looking woman or a remarkable looking person or a remarkable looking person because as I said I think potentially today she may have had different framings for

her gender identity the tattoos were something which surprised people the best one about that as I said she was famously one of Marlena Dietrich's lovers and she got invited to dinner with Marlena and she showed up in a tuxedo right which, which was not done if you're a woman. And so she got sent away from the party to change into a cocktail dress, which was more appropriate. And she came back in the cocktail dress, but of course that showed off all of her sailor tattoos and the kind of suntan and the scars that she'd had from working on engines her whole life,

and they sent her back to change back into the tuxedo. That was more acceptable than wearing a dress that showed off your sailor tattoos you know she stands out in that book of yours and there's some amazing people in that book but she's astonishing she's astonishing you can get away with a lot if you're super wealthy it turns out you know that's true that's true yeah exactly maybe they don't quite deserve a medal these like unbelievably other people who can have their own armies that's to set their own uh fashion agenda thank you matt a lot of coming and what's the book called buddy tell everyone again it's called painted people humanity in 21 tattoos so 20 people

from history plus my great-grandma is a history through tattooing not history of tattooing i've also got a podcast which is called beneath the skin which is where me and my co-host talk about tattoo history and also do weekly reviews of terrible tattoo television programs so if you're interested in that do subscribe as well go and check it out folks um also can i ask you the last question are you secretly a little bit ex-happy that maybe gen z as think tattoos are really transgressive again is it more fun to be covered in tattoos in a society that kind of thinks it's a bit edgy but it's kind of annoying if all these like mainstream icons

are covering tattoos for you, is it or not? Yeah, a tattooer did once say that to me at a talk. They said, look, when I was talking about, for example, Edward VII being tattooed or George V, they were like, don't tell people that. I make my money from people thinking tattooing is cool. And if you go around saying that all these posh people were tattooed, it's going to ruin my business.

Look, I'm very well resigned, Dan, as a 42-year-old man who works in a university surrounded by cool 18, 19 and 20-year-olds. I am long past being cool. So I've had to come to peace with that, unfortunately. You know what they say, Matt? Better to have been cool and lost than never to have been cool at all, which is what I am. So there you go. That's what the old expression is. Matt, thank you very much for coming on, buddy.