User:PandaBananaMarie/History of tattooing

The Military's Role on Tattoos

Old School Tattoo Flash Style. Patriotic Subject.

Military and warfare have had a direct impact on the purpose, subject matter, and reception of Tattoos in American popular culture. The first recorded tattoo artist in the United States was Martin Hildebrandt, who in 1846 was tattooing sailors and soldiers with proud patriotic tattoos of flags and battles. While this helped push tattooing into a popular light, simultaneously "Tattooed Freaks", like P.T. Barnum's "Prince Constantine", were inadvertently counteracting this, and keeping the world of Tattooing out of everyday life. It wasn't until the invention of the Electric Tattoo Machine in the 1880s by Samuel O'Reilly that Tattooing became a little socially acceptable. Still, O'Reilly reported in the 1880s that most of his clients were sailors. A 1908 Article in American Anthropologist reported that 75% of sailors in the U.S. Navy were tattooed. These findings led to one of the first U.S. military regulations on Tattoos in 1909, which concerned the subject matter of the tattoos allowed to be pictured on servicemen.

World Wars

Jerzy Kamieniecki, displays Auschwitz tattoo.

As World War I ravaged the globe, it also ravaged the popularity of tattooing, pushing tattoos even farther under the umbrella of delinquency. What credence tattoos got as symbols of patriotism and war badges in the eyes of the public, was demolished as servicemen moved away from the proud flags motifs and into more sordid depictions.

At the beginning of the second World War Tattooing once again experienced and boom in popularity as now not only sailors in the Navy, but soldiers in the Army and fliers in the Air Force, were once again tattooing their national pride onto their bodies. Famous tattoo artist, Charles Wagner said "Funny Thing about War, fighting men just want to be marked in some way or another" as a way of reasoning for its resurgence in popularity. The hype was short lived, as the craft of tattooing received a major backlash at the end of the second world war, as stories from survivors abroad made it back to the states. During the Second World War, the Nazi's, under the order of Adolph Hitler, rounded up those deemed inferior, into concentration camps. Once there, if they were chosen to live, they were tattooed with numbers onto their arms. Tattoos and Nazism become intertwined, and the extreme distaste for Nazi Germany and Fascism, led to a stronger public outcry against tattooing.

Post World Wars

This backlash would further worsen with use of a tattooed man in a 1950s Marlboro advertisement, which strengthened the publics view that Tattoos were no longer for patriotic servicemen, but for criminals and degenerates. The public distaste was so strong by this point, that usual trend of seeing tattoo popularity spike during times of war, was not seen in the Vietnam War. It would take two more decades, and creators like Lyle Tuttle and Ed Hardy in 1970, Freddy Negrete and Jack Rudy in 1980, and celebrity patrons like Janis Joplin, Peter Fonda, and Cher, till tattooing finally was brought back into societies good graces.

Modern Times/2000's

Tattoo in memorial to fallen comrades.

Starting in the early 2000s, tattoos and the military began to reconnect, as tattoos became a symbolic and popular way to show social and political views Tattoos were being used by soldiers to show belonging, affiliation, and to mark down their war experiences. Rites of passage in the military were marked with tattoos, like when one completes basic training or returns home from service. Modern military tattoos in the United States became less about valor and honor, but bout recognizing the experiences, losses, and struggles of servicemen. Tattoos can now be seen and perceived as ways to convey loss and grief, guilt and anger, as ways to highlight the transformational nature of war on individuals, and even convey, a hope for a better nation and self.

The history of Tattooing in the U.S. can be seen to have been influenced and affected by war and the Military. Though its expression and reception by the public are constantly in flux, both practices are deeply connected and still effect one another today. Dyvik writes in her article, War Ink: Sense Making and Curating War Through Military Tattoos, that "war lingers in and on the bodies and lifeworlds of those who have practiced it"

Lead

Tattooing has been practiced across the globe since at least Neolithic times, as evidenced by mummified preserved skin, ancient art and the archaeological record. The word "tattoo" can be dated back to 3000 BC., and the word was taken from the Polynesian language, "tattaw," which translated means "to strike something.". Both ancient art and archaeological finds of possible tattoo tools suggest tattooing was practiced by the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe. However, direct evidence for tattooing on mummified human skin extends only to the 4th millennium BC. The type of needles used and the pigment  deposited have also varied considerably with time. Earlier tattoo needles were crudely made of bones, whereas the pigments used were derived from soot or plant extracts. Byars(1945)used a row of needles soldered onto a metal bar. The oldest discovery of tattooed human skin to date in 1991 is found on the body of Ötzi the Iceman, dating to between 3370 and 3100 BC. Other tattooed mummies have been recovered from at least 49 archaeological sites, including locations in Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Mongolia, western China, Egypt, Sudan, the Philippines and the Andes. In these states, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were the major religions, and they did not fully accept the concept of tattooing. The mummies found during the archaeological sites were, Priestess of the Goddess Hathor from ancient Egypt (c. 2134–1991 BC), and multiple mummies from Siberia, including the Pazyryk culture of Russia and from several cultures throughout Pre-Columbian South America. There are many reasons for tattooing, whether it is to express one's culture or to create a memoir, or for medical reasons such as (NAC) areola complex for breast reconstruction.

Creating A Brotherhood: Russian Gang Culture

Former Soviet Prisoner

Within the gang cultures of the world, tattoos, along with piercings, are often associated with forms of art, identification, and allegiance to brotherhood. However,  this culture that we see today comes from a want of these gangs to connect to the past of how their pierced class social demographics were treated in the past.  The gang culture in  Russia offers an interesting example of the desire to connect through tattoos. Beginning in the latter days of Imperial Russia,  the common experience of corporal punishment created a bond among both men and women within society. Corporal punishments often left flogging marks and other scares that transformed the body of almost all of the inmates. With these mutilations, people became easily identifiable as Russian/Soviet criminals. These identifiable markers became a problem when some inmates ran away into Serbia.  Inmates who fled tried to conceal their scars with tattoos to keep their identity secret.  However, this wouldn't last long as the prisons started to use tattoos as a form of serial numbers for their inmates. This marking identity imposed on inmates by the prisons created simultaneously created a anti-culture and a new gang culture. By the 1920s, as the Soviet union faced even more  social class troubles, many of the Russian and Soviet criminals were wanting to connect with the ideals and laws associated with past criminals. This created a boom of tattoos among prisoner, that by the late 1920s “about 60-70%” of all inmates had some type of  Tattoo.  This new wave of tattoo among the Russian prisons were seen as a right of passage. Soviet Tattoos often indicated…

• A person Socio-demographic
• What crimes they have committed
• What prisons they associated with
• What drugs they had or used
• And other habits

Through these symbols the Russian prison gangs developed their own language and their own brotherhood.

Bibliography