S3 Ep4: Tattoos, 'Deviant' Signs, and Surveilled Skins

Emma and Christy present a brief history of tattooing in Europe. We talk tattoos as art history; sailors and soldiers; the archival (in)visibility of tattoos; the ‘Cook myth’, colonial contact, and contagion; syphilitic tattoos and pathologisation; working class bodies; tattoos and material culture; criminal anthropology; pain; the skin ego; danger and deviance; the limits of interpretation and (il)legibility of signs; ‘fugitive’ images; pilgrim tattoos; and art histories from below.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading.

MEDIA DISCUSSED
Human skin with tattoos of two women's heads and a sailor, French (1880–1920), Wellcome Collection / Science Museum
Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (1877)
Human skin with tattoo of a mermaid, Polish (late 19th–early 20th century), photographed by Katarzyna Mirczak (2010). For the exact specimen we discuss see Lodder, 'Things of the Sea' (2015), fig. 11.
Photograph showing a man with tattoos and a black eye (late 19th–early 20th century), published in Lombroso, Criminal Man (1911)
Staffordshire cream-ware bowl with inscription 'When this you see,/ remember me / And bear me in your mind / Let all the world,/ say what they will,/ Speak of me as you find', (late 18th century)
Diagram showing Ötzi the Ice Man's tattoos (c. 3230 BCE), from Krutak, 'Therapeutic Tattooing in the Arctic' (2019)
Sydney Parkinson (the artist on Captain Cook's first voyage to New Zealand), portrait of a Maori man with facial tattoos (1769)
Print showing signs signs of syphilis on the site of a tattoo (1889), from 'Notes of Cases on an Outbreak of Syphilis following on Tattooing' (1889)
Wax anatomical venus, Josephinum Museum of the Medical University of Vienna (late 18th century)
Princess of Ukok (Siberia), with tattoos (5th century BCE)
Print of the pilgrim tattoo of Ratge(r) Stubbe (c. 1669), showing Arms of Jerusalem tattoo
Example of material culture with iconography similar to contemporaneous tattoos: Convict love token, 'When this you see, remember me' (c. 1831-1832)
Tattoos by Sutherland Macdonald (late 19th century)
Photograph of incarcerated person known as 'Fromain' (1901), Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris, published in Angel, 'Roses & Daggers' (2015)
Drawing from Lombroso archives of the tattooed body of incarcerated person Francesco Spiteri, with labels describing and categorising his tattoos (1889), Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin
Dried human skin specimen from the body of 'Fromain' (late 19th century), Wellcome Collection / Science Museum, published in Angel, 'Roses & Daggers' (2015)

CREDITS
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‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling
All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin
Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!