TATTOOING NOW MORE POPULAR

Southland Times, Issue 24115, 2 May 1940, Page 8

TATTOOING NOW MORE POPULAR

PATRIOTIC DESIGNS FOR RECRUITS CONVENTIONAL SYMBOL OF VIRILITY (Special to The Times) WELLINGTON, May 1. War time has brought a revival of the vogue for tattooing. Many recruits in the armed forces stationed at Wellington have recently acquired patriotic or fanciful designs on wrists or forearms, though the more elaborate works of art formerly etched on chests and backs seem out of favour with the present generation. The motive for being tattooed appears to lie in the convention that tattooing is symbolic of toughness and virility, qualities highly esteemed in Army and Navy ranks. New Zealand has long been a home of this ornamental art. The Maori of old was, of course, adept at tattooing; his moko was the badge of a Maori gentleman, and high chiefs unable to read or write were wont to make their mark on any document by sketching their facial patterns. More than a century ago, a white man thus embellished attracted a good deal of attention walking about the streets of Belfast; and his narrative of how he came to be tattooed during a trading visit to the East Coast has immortalized the name of Barnet Burns in the history of this Dominion. PROGRESS IN METHODS The Maoris of old had a simple and painful method of engraving one another’s skins; they chiselled their designs deeply with hammer and sharks’ tooth chisel, and rubbed in the pigment by hand. It was a sanguinary and stoical procedure that did not commend itself to white men. In the nineties Professor Samuel F. O’Reilly, of New York, introduced the electric needle. This jabbed a tiny needle onethirtieth of an inch into the skin, at the rate of some 3000 stabs a minute, and inked the pricks as it went. It did not pierce deep enough to hurt or draw blood. The electric needle was accompanied by a fashion for tattooing. King George V had himself tattooed. The Earl of Craven startled fashionable New York by appearing in a club bathroom with the crest of his house indelibly marked on his hide. Even ladies of fashion had monograms and suitable designs marked on arms and shoulders. The craze did not last, but the tattooing did, often to the embarrassment of the human picture gallery. Human hearts are frail, and one of the main sources of income to tattoo artists has always been the changing and erasing of indiscreet names, initials, hearts and arrows, from the epidermis of those who were prepared to stake their skins they would love Mary forever—till they happened to meet Jane. HAD HIS PICTURES FRAMED One of the most famous artists of the electric needle was Harry Lawson, of Los Angeles. It is recorded that in his establishment were exhibited framed samples of his work taken from the bodies of customers who had subsequently perished. But as a general rule, tattooing is a contradiction of the adage that art endures longer than life. The most famous tattooed man was probably George Constantine, an Albanian Greek protege of the celebrated showman Phineas T. Barnum. Like New Zealand’s Barnet Burns, Constantine was tattooed from head to foot—but with pictures instead of with the spiral designs beloved of the Maori artists.