Tattooing

A LOW BUZZ EMANATES FROM A DINGY stall on a street in New York City’s infamous Bowery district. Inside, under a bare bulb, one man is hunched over the naked back of another, engraving something into his skin and pausing occasionally to wipe away the blood. The walls are decorated with brightly colored cartoonlike drawings: battleships, impaled valentine hearts, scantily clad women, skulls. The year is 1900. Here is the ancient art of tattooing, practiced in some form in almost all regions of the world for millennia. But in American shops like this one at the turn of the twentieth century, situated among the bustling brothels and pubs of lower Manhattan, an industrial revolution in tattooing technology is under way.

Tattooing is believed to date from the Paleolithic Age, and the marks have been identified on Egyptian mummies and ancient corpses found frozen in glaciers. It arose in almost every corner of the world, among pre-Christian Picts and Scots, Indians, Native Americans on both continents, Inuits, Chinese, Japanese, and, most famously, South Sea Islanders. In the West, Herodotus, Plutarch, Plato, Galen, Seneca, and others knew of tattooing, but by the time it was first recorded in the ancient literature, it had already fallen out of favor among the Greek and Roman upper classes. As Christianity expanded in Europe, the art retreated further, and in A.D. 787 Pope Hadrian I went so far as to outlaw it. Tattoo historians believe it had disappeared altogether in Europe by the early modern period.

Overseas exploration brought it back. By the fifteenth century, British sailors were returning from the West Indies with stories of painted natives, and in the late 1760s Captain Cook’s South Sea voyages introduced tattooing among Europeans themselves, primarily English sailors. Sailors learned the art and took it back to English ports. Tattoo became one of the few Polynesian words to enter the language, along with, perhaps not coincidentally, the word taboo . Sketches showing elaborately etched natives from Polynesia and the Americas were fascinating European highbrows by the turn of the nineteenth century, and this delight in the exotic quickly found a more typical and mundane outlet: commercialization. As early as 1691, a tattooed man from the Philippines was exhibited in London as “Prince Giolo,” and by the late eighteenth century, Maori warriors had discovered that Europeans would trade a musket for a single tattooed head (obtained by raiding enemy villages and sold to collectors in Sydney, Australia).

For millennia, tattoos were made with a pointed stick or a small hammer fitted with a sharp point. The artist made tiny pinpricks in the skin and then rubbed pigment into them. The exact technique varied somewhat from culture to culture around the world, but the basic principle was the same everywhere: A chemically stable pigment, discovered no doubt by trial and error, was rubbed into the skin and tended to remain there and stay visible through the relatively hairless, translucent skin on most of the body. The effect was especially dramatic on light-skinned Europeans, which makes it that much more inexplicable that the technique virtually disappeared among them. Or perhaps it helps explain why it disappeared so soon. As empires expanded, new styles and techniques were brought back to Europe. Brightly colored pigments, probably borrowed from the Japanese, began to be used more widely in the nineteenth century, giving tattoo artists a much broader palette. Although many people were fascinated by the tattoo’s allure, few people outside the military and the merchant marine went so far as to obtain one.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, getting decorative tattoos suddenly began to appeal to a wider public, perhaps urged on by the Romantic notion of following one’s passions. Edward, Prince of Wales, had a cross tattooed on his arm in 1862. during a visit to Jerusalem, inspiring a minor fad among the British upper class. Suddenly, there was a demand for tattoo artists in the cities of Europe, and those who had learned the technique in the military were happy to oblige. The first tattoo shop in London opened around 1870.

It was in New York, however, that tattooing underwent its industrial revolution, transformed by a simple electrical machine that greatly sped up the laborious process of pricking the skin. At a time when New York did not yet have electricpower service, the new device represented one of the cuttingedge applications of electricity. And the inspiration behind it was none other than Thomas A. Edison.

In 1875 Edison invented what he called the electric pen, a handheld, motor-driven device with an oscillating needle intended to prick a sheet of paper. “Writing” with the electric pen resulted in words that were drawn as strings of tiny, closely spaced holes. The paper, when placed in a special frame, became a stencil, the master copy in a simpie, inexpensive form of printing. This protophotocopier could, Edison thought, benefit businesses by filling the void between unique handwritten documents and mass-produced printed pages.

Edison licensed the technology to the A. B. Dick Company of Chicago. A. B. Dick, however, was less interested in the electric pen itself than in the use of its stencil method for document duplication. By modifying the process for use with another mechanical invention, the typewriter, Dick developed what became known as the mimeograph. This small-scale, lowcost form of printing came to dominate the office duplicating market and remained in use well into the late twentieth century. It also inspired imitators, such as the Ditto spirit duplicator machine.

The historian Jill Cooper has traced the business history of the electric pen and found that it never succeeded as an office machine. It did, however, inspire an innovative New York City tattooist named Samuel F. O’Reilly to experiment with the high-speed perforation of human skin. By slightly modifying the electric pen, he was able to obtain a patent for a tattoo machine in 1891, and he immediately began manufacturing and selling it to other tattooists in addition to using it in his own shop.

O’Reilly’s machine consisted of a battery-operated, handheld electric motor that actuated a needle or a row of up to five needles. The shafts of the needles passed through the orifice of a small ink cup, and gravity caused ink to run down the needles to the tip. As the artist drew a design on the skin, the reciprocating needles made shallow wounds and simultaneously pushed some ink into the wounds. For outlining the design, sometimes only one needle was inserted, but for filling in the design with a broader stroke, the artist could use more needles. It was this filling operation that was particularly sped up by the machine. It could produce 3,000 skin-pricks per minute, many times the 150 to 200 possible by hand. The speed and efficiency of the new device reduced the time needed to complete a complex tattoo from days to mere hours. Yet it did not demand major adjustments on the part of the artists. They could use the same inks (often these were made from secret formulas) and designs as before. This helps explain why the technology was welcomed even by those who considered themselves true artists.

The transformation of tattooing into a high-speed, mechanized process in the 18905 came at an opportune time. Toward the end of the decade, a horde of unmarked Navy men began passing through town in the wake of the Spanish-American War. Soon, New York had dozens of tattoo shons. most of them located in the seedier areas of town. The new scene created the first generation of now-legendary artists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, men with names like Electric Elmer Getchel, Lame Leroy, Texas Bob Wick, Lew the Jew, and Sailor Joe Van Hart. The blossoming of the tattoo business also created some rivalries, not only artistic ones but economic and legal ones. Electric Elmer and Samuel O’Reilly became locked in a patent dispute, each claiming to have invented the new machine. Some of the most prominent New York artists also made and sold their own equipment on a small scale, and the field remained very localized for many years. The tattoo-machine advertising copy of the 1920s in magazines like Popular Mechanics reflected the terrific personal rivalries between these craftsmen. One denounced his competitor’s equipment as made from “door buzzers, radio parts, tubes made from metallic pen[s] or umbrella stem[s]. Such crap as this could not be classed with tattooing machines and designs made by a skillful mechanic and artist of lone reputation.”

Using the high-speed electric method, artists drew battleships and broken hearts onto sailors with unprecedented speed, and the market for the designs diversified when it became the fad to exhibit tattooed men and women as “freaks” in the numerous circuses and carnivals that traveled around the country. In the 1890s, many of these performers were real or invented Native Americans, who posed as stoic “painted Indians” in sideshows. When the painted Indian lost his appeal, new tattooed freaks were offered up, including women and even animals, such as a tattooed cow at Coney Island. Circus performers appreciated the speed of O’Reilly’s electric tattooer because with its added rapidity, they spent only many, many hours—instead of days—getting the colorful, full-body tattoos that audiences loved. Alas, those who were not quick to have their body work finished must have been disappointed when the public’s enthusiasm faded a few years later.

In the years between fads, military customers remained key, but this market also saw periodic bursts of demand, and tattooing saw its next major wave of popularity with the out-break of World War I. Niche markets have never stopped appearing. Off and on through the twentieth century, it was fashionable for women to have permanent “makeup” applied to their eyelids, cheeks, or lips. At the turn of the twentieth century, some actually considered it healthful to go under the needle. People occasionally visited tattoo artists not to get a design applied but simply to have their skin treated with the machine, in the hope that the action of the inkless needles would relieve the pain of rheumatism.

Unfortunately, the more common health effects were diseases such as lockjaw, gangrene, and syphilis. The common practice of mixing dry pigments on-the-spot with saliva must certainly have contributed to this, as did the nearly total lack of sterilization for the needles. New York and London authorities began regulating the trade early in the twentieth century, insisting on sanitary practices such as the end of the use of body fluids, and requiring that tattoo removal be done only by licensed physicians. Some state governments shut down tattoo parlors altogether, although this tended simply to drive them underground, where regulating sanitation was nearly impossible. Despite these restrictions, the popularity of tattoos grew in the 1920s and 1930s.

Tattoos were so common among criminals by the early twentieth century that police regularly began searching prisoners for them and keeping descriptions of them in their records for future reference. The marks sometimes proved useful when the police needed to put a name to a dismembered or decomposed corpse. Then, as now, outlaws, gangsters, and even members of secret societies or heretical religious sects would employ tattoos as a sign of brotherhood or identity, despite the risk of being detected.

Actually, the association between tattoos and outlaws or other low-status individuals is even older than the link between tattoos and the armed forces. As the Latin word for tattoo, stigma , suggests, the marks carried a negative connotation even in ancient times. Crimes in Greece and Rome were sometimes punishable by tattooing, and Plato, for one, thought that sacrilege should be penalized by forced tattooing and banishment. The punitive marks were usually placed in highly visible places, such as the hands or face, a permanent scarlet letter for all to see. Slaves were also sometimes tattooed for identification purposes, marking them as lowly even if they were later freed. Constantine declared in A.D. 325 that men sentenced to be gladiators or miners would be identified with tattoos on the legs or hands. The custom gradually died out in Europe, but not in Asia, where Japanese criminals were sometimes tattooed with the pictograph for dog as late as the sixteenth century.

In the twentieth century, systematic tattooing for identification was revived, but initially for farm animals and pets rather than for people. Around the turn of the century, an artist named Michael J. Butler established a shop in Baltimore and stumbled onto what became a booming business, tattooing initials, family crests, and monograms onto pets owned by the wealthy. Later, in the 1920s, the tattooing of hogs and cows began to replace branding in some states. New Jersey even established the first public registry for tattooed poultry (hens were generally thought too small to be branded in the normal way). The electric machine was not well suited for applying standardized numbers and digits on large livestock quickly and cleanly, so farmers used a sort of metal type, pounded or pressed into the skin of the ear, the ink scrubbed into the wound with a stiff brush. The success of this form of identification may have inspired a curious phenomenon a few years later, when, in the early 19305, pa ents in the largely rural state of New Jersey began to have their infants tattooed in reaction to the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping. The practice disappeared when that furor subsided.

The most notorious use of tattoos for identification occurred, of course, in the midst of the Nazi Holocaust. As Hitler escalated the genocide during and after 1943, German officers administering slave-labor camps struggled to keep track of all the newly arriving prisoners. The SS adopted a system of tattooing for permanently identifying prisoners “lucky” enough to be selected as laborers. Those put to death immediately were not registered this way. As one former prisoner put it, “The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid: they placed us all in a row, we filed past a skillful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. … The numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationality.” Exactly how the tattoos were applied in the camps is not well documented. Some prisoners received tattoos with a simple mechanical device similar to a livestock marker, with a metal plate first slapped against the skin and then ink rubbed into the wound. Others were labeled with the electric machine as well.

Many former inmates of the Nazi concentration camps kept the numbers as a visible reminder of their treatment, but tattooing of any kind has always generated large numbers of people later wanting their designs removed. Quick and effective removal of these inks was not, unfortunately, possible until very recently. Greek and Roman physicians, according to the historian Steve Gilbert, did a brisk business erasing the marks from soldiers and former slaves, but the work was difficult and painful. The sixth-century physician Aetius wrote of a highly corrosive concoction that would burn away a tattoo. Others repricked the skin and forced in a bizarre range of mixtures supposed to make the design fade, including pigeon feces, Spanish fly, and a brew made from vinegar and the scrapings from the bottom of a chamber pot.

Chemicals and mixtures intended to make the inks disappear included stale urine, mother’s milk, acid, garlic, pepper, and lime, each to be injected under the skin with the same technique used to apply the tattoo. By the early twentieth century, doctors sometimes removed the marks surgically by cutting off the affected skin, scrubbing it with a steel brush, or scraping under the skin with a “tephine,” which resembled a carpenter’s tool. Luckily, anesthesia was generally available by then. Despite ordinances banning artists from offering a removal service, they gladly did in most shops. Samuel O’Reilly, for one, denounced the idea that milk or urine shot under the skin with the electric machine would remove tattoos, but like many tattoo artists, he touted his own secret formula, which he claimed worked quickly and painlessly without leaving a scar. Sure it did. The only major improvement in tattoo removal in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century was the introduction of the freezing of the affected skin with liquid nitrogen. The brittle patch of skin could then be removed with forceps and the wound closed with stitches.

Despite the crudeness of these procedures, they were extremely popular. Those who were embarrassed by a tattoo commissioned on a whim (or under the influence of alcohol) considered an ugly scar far less offensive than a beautiful tattoo, and with so many tattoos celebrating love, sometimes even a grisly operation must have seemed less painful than the constant reminder of a lost romance. The emotional level, when it came to removing a tattoo, could run high. One man in London was so distraught by the appearance of his new tattoo that he lay down next to a railroad track with his arm stretched over a rail. A passing locomotive effectively removed it.

When they were not offending their owners, hula gals and nude lovelies stenciled onto chests and arms more than occasionally caused trouble with others, and this also created demand for effective removal techniques. Many a design has been removed or at least covered over at the insistence of a jealous girlfriend or bride. The U.S. Navy banned lewd tattoos in 1909, opening a lucrative market for artists who now applied bras and panties to the natural female form. The Navy had such a serious problem with immodest tattoos and botched eradications that it conducted its own study of the best method of removal, which was published in the late 1920s.

However, an effective tattoo removal process that did not cause serious scarring remained elusive. A group of physicians led by Leon Goldman, at the University of Cincinnati, experimentally used a laser for tattoo removal in 1964, when the technology was just a few years old. The concentrated light penetrated the skin and attacked dark pigments, causing them to fade, but the lack of a way to regulate the beam made scarring still likely. The Q-switched laser, developed a few years afterward, which emitted tightly regulated pulses, could do the job with less scarring, but the treatment was prohibitively expensive. Ten years later, after medical lasers had entered production and prices had come down, Q-switched devices were rediscovered and given approval for tattoo removal—just in time for the wave of tattooing among teenagers and young adults that began in the 19805. Today, laser removal is still imperfect, but more than 80 percent of those who undergo removal see significant fading with little or no scarring.

The tattoo stands now as one of the most widely owned forms of art in the world, and it is probably the only one that can be defaced or even obliterated without offending anyone. In fact, opening a gallery to save actual tattooed skin for future generations would be creepy indeed. But those who might be considering tattoos should remember that while body art lasts only as long as its owner lives, that can still be quite a long time. Tattooing, as well as the machinery it employs, will probably remain unchanged, as it has since the late nineteenth century. But the technology for undoing what the tattoo machine has wrought will doubtless be stimulating innovations for years.