By the year 1800, tattooing had become a global phenomenon. Stigma authors Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky discuss how and why tattoos circulated in the early modern world.
We think of tattooing as a contemporary phenomenon, now ubiquitous in the twenty-first century. We see elaborately tattooed skin daily—at the beach, in the street, and in the college classroom. Nearly half of all Americans under forty today have chosen to adorn their skin with tattoos, often multiple times, and tattoos mark the skin of people of all ages, backgrounds, and genders. But tattooing has been with us since prehistory as a locally defined but widespread and permanent form of cutaneous marking. This form of skin marking carries an extraordinary range of meanings and has traveled across diverse cultures, especially during the early modern period. The years 1450–1800 were a new age of dermal encounters, as forms of marking skin native to the Americas, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Europe came into contact as never before. Cast simultaneously as a mark of belonging and of distinction, the tattoo held particular prominence as a sign of identity in this period of unprecedented global movement. Global tattooing practices, largely recorded in written archives by European travelers and colonists, but also preserved in archeological findings and oral histories, were an object of fascination, but also familiarity.
Native nations across the Americas practiced tattooing to communicate identity, commemorate valiant deeds, and signal honorable status long before the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century. Using sharpened bird or fish bones and plant- or mineral-based dyes such as genipap, red lead, sap, or charcoal, Native Americans would prick a design into the skin and then rub dye or powder into the incisions, creating a permanent mark. Some European colonists in the Americas chose to be tattooed by Native people, often adopting the practice to fashion new hybrid identities for themselves. While some Europeans discouraged getting marked, seeing tattoos as a sign of “savagery,” French fur traders and military men making their lives in North America were especially open to receiving Native tattoos. Plant, animal, and celestial designs from Native American tradition were placed on their skin alongside crosses and coats of arms borrowed from European Christian tradition.
Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese colonizers, on the other hand, were more hostile to Indigenous tattoo traditions. European and Chinese observers alike noted the “barbarity” of Indigenous Formosan tattooing when they reported on Taiwan in parallel seventeenth-century accounts, though Chinese officials also looked for signs of filial piety consistent with their own Confucian values. Spanish officials and Catholic missionaries worked hard to repress the rich tattoo traditions of the Philippines among the Indigenous Bizayas, reading marks on skin as essential and indelible signs of their inferior identity.
Whatever European colonists might have thought about the marking practices of Indigenous peoples around the globe, tattoos were well known to Europeans prior to these encounters. Indeed, tattoos were familiar in early modern Europe—and had been for centuries—as signs of identity, belonging, love, and piety. Though the Polynesian word tatau came into European languages only in the late eighteenth-century following the South Seas voyages of Bougainville and Cook, the practice of permanently marking the body through pricking and ink had long existed on the European continent. European travelers writing about Native American tattooing in the seventeenth century often referred their readers back to stories of elaborately painted Ancient Picts, indigenous to Britain and France. From their own time, they referenced devoted courtiers who wore their beloveds’ monograms permanently pricked on their arms, alchemists who inscribed their skin with astral characters to harness their power, and Holy Land pilgrims. In Jerusalem and Bethlehem, local Christians “marked” the bodies of Coptic, Armenian, and European pilgrims with scenes of Christ’s passion and representations of sacred sites. Pilgrims would choose from a range of woodblock designs that the tattoo artist would rub in charcoal and imprint on their arm. The tattooist would then use a series of fine needles bound together, dipped in an ink made of fine soot and ox gall, and prick along the lines of the stamped figure, finally washing it with wine, sometimes repeating the process. For European Holy Land pilgrims, tattoos commemorated their arduous travels, signaling their devotion and bravery. Given the pain they experienced—swelling and fever often lasting for days—they may also have imagined their tattoos as stigmata or a form of imitatio Christi.. Even today, Christians visiting Jerusalem can get marked at the Razzouk Tattoo shop, where Wassim Razzouk and his sons still use centuries-old wooden stamps passed down in his family for generations.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europeans increasingly associated Indigenous forms of tattooing with cultural inferiority and tied tattoos in European traditions exclusively to criminals and sailors. This denial of the age-old use of the tattoo as a desirable and honorable global and European sign lasted until the “tattoo Renaissance” of the late twentieth century.
Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World is now available from Penn State University Press. Learn more and order the book here: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09442-7.html. Save 30% w/ discount code NR23.
