Written on the Body

The Tattoo in European and American History

Jane Caplan

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691057231
  9780691057224
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691238258
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Despite the social sciences' growing fascination with tattooing--and the immense popularity of tattoos themselves--the practice has not left much of a historical record. And, until very recently, there was no good context for writing a serious history of tattooing in the West. This collection exposes, for the first time, the richness of the tattoo's European and American history from antiquity to the present day. In the process, it rescues tattoos from their stereotypical and sensationalized association with criminality.


The tattoo has long hovered in a space between the cosmetic and the punitive. Throughout its history, the status of the tattoo has been complicated by its dual association with slavery and penal practices on the one hand and exotic or forbidden sexuality on the other. The tattoo appears often as an involuntary stigma, sometimes as a self-imposed marker of identity, and occasionally as a beautiful corporal decoration.


This volume analyzes the tattoo's fluctuating, often uncomfortable position from multiple angles. Individual chapters explore fascinating segments of its history--from the metaphorical meanings of tattooing in Celtic society to the class-related commodification of the body in Victorian Britain, from tattooed entertainers in Germany to tattooing and piercing as self-expression in the contemporary United States. But they also accumulate to form an expansive, textured view of permanent bodily modification in the West.


By combining empirical history, powerful cultural analysis, and a highly readable style, this volume both draws on and propels the ongoing effort to write a meaningful cultural history of the body. The contributors, representing several disciplines, have all conducted extensive original research into the Western tattoo. Together, they have produced an unrivalled account of its history. They are, in addition to the editor, Clare Anderson, Susan Benson, James Bradley, Ian Duffield, Juliet Fleming, Alan Govenar, Harriet Guest, Mark Gustafson, C. P. Jones, Charles MacQuarrie, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Stephan Oettermann, Jennipher A. Rosecrans, and Abby Schrader.

1Stigma and Tattoo¹

C. P. JONES

Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible. Some have ill-design’d figures of men, birds, or dogs; the women generally have this figure Z simply on every joint of their fingers and Toes; the men have it likewise, and both have other differant [sic] figures, such as Circles, Crescents, etc., which they have on their Arms and Legs... Their method of Tattowing I shall now describe. The colour they use is lamp black, prepar’d from the Smoak of a Kind of Oily nut, used by them instead of Candles. The instrument for pricking it under the Skin is made of very thin flatt pieces of bone or Shell, from a quarter of an inch to an inch and a half broad, according to the purpose it is to be used for, and about an inch and a half long. One end is cut into sharp teeth, and the other fastened to a handle. The teeth are dipped into black Liquor, and then drove, by quick, sharp blows struck upon the handle with a Stick for that purpose, into the skin so deep that every stroke is followed with a small quantity of Blood. The part so marked remains sore for some days before it heals. As this is a painful operation, especially the Tattowing their Buttocks, it is perform’d but once in their Life times; it is never done until they are 12 or 14 years of Age.²

Thus Captain James Cook observed the practice of ‘tattowing’ on Tahiti in July 1769, and his description, though not published until 1893, is the first appearance of the word in the English language. His contemporaries (and this is the age of Winckelmann and Lessing) would have been shocked at the notion that the Greeks and Romans followed so barbarous a custom, and even now such an idea may come as a surprise. This essay is mainly concerned with two problems: how much did these two peoples practise either tattoooing or branding, and what terms did they use to describe them?

Greek and Roman texts referring to body-marking often use the term stigma, or cognate words like the verb stizo, and ‘stigma’ has passed into our own language with the sense of ‘mark of infamy’, ‘moral blot’. In part because of the medieval phenomenon of‘stigmatization’, the appearance of markings on the hands and feet of mystics like St Francis of Assisi, ancient references to stigmata have often been taken to denote some kind of branding or burning, as in The New Catholic Encylopaedia:³

Term derived from the Greek root stigma, meaning mark and in particular, a brand impressed by iron. It was used in antiquity to refer to marks branded on cattle, on all slaves in the Orient, and on fugitive slaves in Greece and Rome. Soldiers also, of some Eastern countries, wore stigmata.

The present essay will argue that this view does not withstand analysis. ‘Stigmata’ among the Greeks and Romans are almost always tattoo- and not brand-marks. The branding of humans was almost unknown to the Greeks, and even among the more brutal Romans was comparatively rare, and was denoted by the word stigma only sporadically and at a comparatively late date. By contrast, animal-branding was universal, and is virtually never designated by the word stigma but by a word denoting a burn or a stamp.

Tattooing had certainly existed long before the dawn of Greek culture, even if we place that dawn in the mid-second millennium. The so-called ‘Ice Man’ discovered in the Alto Adige in September 1991 was tattooed; this extraordinary find is dated between 3300 and 3200 BC.⁴ Among peoples who were later in contact with the Greeks, the Egyptians are the first to provide evidence for tattooing. Here it is first found on mummies of the Eleventh Dynasty, about 2100 BC; the colour used was a ‘dark, blackish-blue pigment applied with a pricking instrument, perhaps consisting of one or more fish bones set into a wooden handle’.⁵ (There is an obvious similarity with Cook’s ‘lamp black, prepar’d from the Smoak of a Kind of Oily nut’ and with his ‘instrument... made of very thin flatt pieces of bone or Shell’.) The practice is also found among the early Israelites, since the ‘Holiness Code’ of Leviticus contains the injunction, ‘You shall not gash yourselves in mourning for the dead: you shall not tattoo yourselves.’ The so-called Deutero-Isaiah, writing in the sixth century BC, predicts that the Jews too will adopt the practice after their redemption: ‘This man will say, “I am the Lord’s man”... another shall write the Lord’s name on his hand.’⁶

About the time of Deutero-Isaiah, the Greeks began to notice that certain of their northern neighbours marked their skins with decorative patterns which are almost certainly tattoos rather than body-paint. They associated this practice above all with the Thracians, the ‘barbarian’ people living in what is now southern Bulgaria and European Turkey. Many Greek vase paintings, most of them of Athenian manufacture, show Thracian women with marks; these are usually placed on the leg or the arm, and consist of abstract designs or of simple figures such as deer. The women are often portrayed as ‘Maenads’, the ‘mad women’ who were believed to have murdered the poet Orpheus. Thus a lekythos (oil-vase) of c. 460 BC, now in Boston, shows a Maenad with a little rosette on her right elbow and left ankle, and V-shaped marks down her right forearm; it is unclear whether the three parallel lines round her wrists and ankles are tattoos or jewellery. A crater (wine-mixing vessel) of about 350 from Apulia, now in the British Museum, illustrates another myth, that of the Thracian king Lycurgus who murdered his wife and children in a fit of madness. One figure on it is a woman, who is either the nurse or the mother of one of the murdered sons. She has an elaborate display of alternating zigzags and double lines on her arms and legs. In literature, these markings are sometimes said to have been inflicted on the Thracian women by their menfolk as a punishment for their killing of Orpheus, or alternatively to be a sign of mourning for him. But this is probably an interpretation concocted by the Greeks, since in real life Thracian males were also tattooed, just as Captain Cook found ‘tattowing’ among both sexes in Tahiti.⁷

Red-figure lekythos showing a tattooed Maenad slaying Orpheus, C.460 BC. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Francis Bartlett Fund).

Crater showing a woman (a mother or nurse) carrying the murdered son of King Lycurgus, c.350 BC. British Museum, London.

Clearly such designs are far too elaborate to be branded. The vases alone do not prove that they are tattooed rather than painted, but it is here that the evidence of literature enters. When referring to Thracian body-marking, the Greeks consistently use words of a single etymological family, all having the root stig-. The first to do so is Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’, writing c. 430, who makes a point often repeated by others, that for the Thracians ‘to be marked [estichthai] is considered a sign of high birth, whereas to be unmarked [astikton] is considered one of low birth’.⁸ The same point is made by the author of an anonymous work written in the fourth century, the Double Arguments: ‘For the Thracians it is an adornment for girls to be marked [stizesthai], but among other peoples it is a punishment for criminals.’⁹

The question thus becomes an etymological one: why do ancient authors resort to verbs deriving from the root stig- in order to refer to Thracian bodymarking? The Greek verb stizein, which is directly formed from this root, means ‘to prick’, and is related to the English sting, stitch, to the German stechen (‘prick’), sticken (‘embroider’). The commonest of the nouns formed from the same root, stigma, first appears in Greek with reference to the spots of snakes, and later it often means ‘dot’ or ‘mark’. Remembering that Captain Cook talked of ‘pricking [tattoos] under the skin’, we can infer that the verb stizein refers to what we call tattooing, and that the Greeks regarded the puncture of the skin as the essential part of the operation.

This inference is borne out by the clearest account that survives from antiquity for the methods of applying and removing stigmata, though our source is as late as the sixth century of the Christian era. The doctor Aetius practised in Alexandria and Constantinople in the reign of Justinian, and his extant encyclopaedia of medicine, the Tetrabiblon, contains the following entry for the word stigmata:

They call stigmata things inscribed on the face or some other part of the body, for example on the hands of soldiers, and they use the following ink. [The recipe follows.] Apply by pricking the places with needles, wiping away the blood, and rubbing in first juice of leek, and then the preparation ... In cases where we wish to remove such stigmata, we must use the following preparations ... When applying, first clean the stigmata with niter, smear them with resin of terebinth, and bandage for five days . . . The stigmata are removed in twenty days, without great ulceration and without a scar.¹⁰

We can therefore safely understand the word stigma to refer to what we call tattooing. From here we can go on to question the cultural significance of this kind of body-marking: what did it mean to the peoples among whom the Greeks first encountered it, such as the Thracians? And, since the Greeks from the fifth century on began to use tattooing among themselves, did they give it the same meaning as those from whom they imported it?

We have no verbal evidence from the Thracians to show the significance of their tattoos, whether decorative, religious, medicinal, or a combination of two or more of these. In a presumably male-dominated society, however, female tattooing is not likely to be simply decorative, and may well be connected with the status of the family or clan. Though the Persians and the Egyptians, both peoples with whom the Greeks had many contacts, also used tattoos, what we have of their literature is of no help either. With them, however, we can discern several functions which, though separate, blend into one another. One is connected with social status, as possibly with the Thracians. Closely akin, since social status often confers desirability, is decoration - drawing attention to the body by adorning it with pictures and patterns. To the extent that status may be religious rather than secular, another function may be to mark the body with signs or emblems which denote membership in a particular cult-group. Another usage is also connected with status, but in an inverted way: the penal use of stigmata as marks of degradation. This last use is not so far from the religious as might appear. In certain religions, including Christianity for much of its history, the divinity is thought of as a ‘lord’ or ‘master’, and his followers (since such divinities are usually male) as his ‘slaves’. It is no great distance, therefore, to treating stigmata as the mark of human slavery, especially slavery of an extreme kind which will never be commuted to freedom.

To begin with tattooing as a status-marker or as decoration, we have seen that this is its likely function among the Thracians, even though our Greek sources, both verbal and visual, single out females as the main carriers of tattoos. The same function is implied by child-tattooing, though it is very rarely mentioned. The historian Xenophon in the early fourth century describes a tribe called ‘Mossynoikoi’, ‘Tower-dwellers’, which he encountered on the shores of the Black Sea. These showed their Greek visitors ‘children of good families . . . entirely decorated on back and front, being tattooed [estigmenous] with flowers’.¹¹ There is also ample evidence for males being tattooed among other ‘barbarian’ nations, for example the unsubdued tribes of Scotland. According to the late historian Herodian, ‘these people tattoo [stizontai] their bodies with various designs and animal-representations of every kind; and hence they do not wear clothing, so as not to cover up the designs on their bodies’.¹² This might be a transference from tribes living in warmer climes, since it is hard to imagine Scottish highlanders in habitual nudity. If Herodian is correct, however, his statement coincides remarkably with the observations of Captain Cook on Tahiti.

It is probably because tattooing served a religious function among neighbours of the Israelites that it was soon banned in Jewish law. That agrees with an observation of Greek writers, that religious tattooing was used in the Fertile Crescent and in Egypt. Herodotus, who was our first witness to Thracian tattooing, says the following about a temple at the easternmost or ‘Canopic’ mouth of the Nile: ‘If a slave belonging to any human owner at all takes refuge here and assumes the sacred tattoos [stigmata], giving himself to the god, no-one may touch him’.¹³ Among the Syrians, the practice of sacred tattooing, especially on the wrist, is attested in the Hellenistic period. A papyrus of the mid-second century BC contains a description of a runaway slave from the city Bambyke (Hierapolis) in Syria, the chief sanctuary of the ‘Syrian goddess’ par excellence, Atargatis. The papyrus describes the slave as ‘tattooed [estigmenos] on the right wrist with two barbarian letters’, and since Atargatis had a consort-divinity named Hadad, these ‘barbarian’ letters are likely to be the Syriac initials of the two gods.¹⁴ The satirist Lucian, writing about three centuries later in the period of the Roman empire, and describing this same sanctuary, says of Atargatis’ devotees, ‘They are all tattooed [stizontai], some on the wrist, some on the neck, and as a result all the Assyrians [that is, Syrians] have tattoos [stigmatophoreousin].’¹⁵ We shall return to the subject of tattooing in early Christian literature, and to the survival of the practice in the Holy Land until modern times.

Herodotus regards the tattoos voluntarily adopted by runaway slaves at Canopus as a mark of self-devotion to the local god. Such slaves were now transferred from their human owners to a divine one, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on the Editor and Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Stigma and Tattoo
• Chapter 2: The Tattoo in the Later Roman Empire and Beyond
• Chapter 3: Insular Celtic Tattooing: History, Myth and Metaphor
• Chapter 4: Wearing the Universe: Symbolic Markings in Early Modern England
• Chapter 5: The Renaissance Tattoo
• Chapter 6: Curiously Marked: Tattooing and Gender Difference in Eighteenth-century British Perceptions of the South Pacific
• Chapter 7: Godna: Inscribing Indian Convicts in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 8: Skin Deep Devotions: Religious Tattoos and Convict Transportation to Australia
• Chapter 9: Body Commodification? Class and Tattoos in Victorian Britain
• Chapter 10: ‘National Tattooing’: Traditions of Tattooing in Nineteenth-century Europe
• Chapter 11: Branding the Other/Tattooing the Self: Bodily Inscription among Convicts in Russia and the Soviet Union
• Chapter 12: On Display: Tattooed Entertainers in America and Germany
• Chapter 13: The Changing Image of Tattooing in American Culture, 1846-1966
• Chapter 14: Inscriptions of the Self: Reflections on Tattooing and Piercing in Contemporary Euro-America
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Index