Victorian Women’s Tattoos

‘Well, have a religious picture – that ain’t going to do you no harm’. The young woman agreed. She sat down on the public house bench, presented the man with her day’s earnings, and rolled up her sleeve, revealing a small marking: a pair of initials just above the wrist. At the end of the hour, she would have a second tattoo. This time, she opted for a simple cross, a symbol that expressed her reverence to God, and would memorialize her recently-deceased mother. The gruff tattooer collected her coins and opened a small pot of dark ink. ‘Ready?’

Despite frequent claims that tattooing only became widespread and mainstream in recent decades, the medium has been embraced by a range of historical actors across cultures and time. Indeed, tattoos were especially popular across Britain in the 1890s and 1900s, marking the start of a period that art historian Matt Lodder calls the ‘professional era of tattooing’. Among those getting tattooed at the turn of the century were women who lived on the margins of British society.

Victorian and Edwardian physician and prison reform advocate Mary Gordon is one of the few contemporaries to leave us evidence of tattooed women. In March 1908, Gordon was appointed the first woman inspector of prisons in Britain. Over the subsequent decade, she also became well-known as a champion of women’s suffrage and a strident advocate for the reform of Britain’s prison and justice systems. In 1922, she published a memoir entitled Penal Discipline in which she reflects on her unique, first-hand experience in women’s prisons. Beside lengthy meditations on ‘inebriate vagabonds’ and petty offenders. Gordon recounts conversations she had with imprisoned tattooed women, offering rare insight into tattoo cultures and practices among women at the turn of the 20th century.

In Penal Discipline, Gordon describes tattoos of roses and other flowers, butterflies, leaves, clasped hands, hearts, and birds. Snakes were a popular choice, too, as symbols of vengeance. Many imprisoned women also had text tattooed on their arms, often the names or initials of sweethearts and lovers. The particularly brazen had their arms, ‘covered with men’s names very much in the boastful spirit of the scalp-hunter’. Other common choices for text included ‘true love’ and ‘mother’ or ‘father’ on or near the wrist, coupled with a small memorial cross. One woman had a three-dimensional cross tattooed between her breasts, the bottom of the cross beginning at the base of her sternum and reaching almost up to her collarbone. Indeed, religious symbols like this were very common first tattoos, especially for younger girls. More mature (and more heavily tattooed) women, on the the other hand sometimes opted for detailed designs of biblical scenes: one prisoner had the Last Supper tattooed on her abdomen, another, an intricate depiction of the Nativity on her chest.

By the telling of the grainy photographs published in Penal Discipline, these tattoos were characterised by fine lines and little (if any) shading. They may have been tattooed entirely in black ink, though blue and red inks were also widely available in the period. Gordon writes that the work was ‘as a rule, ill-drawn, coarse, and frequently done from a poor transfer’. This is hardly surprising given how and where women got inked. In addition to public houses, where (male) tattooers often set up shop across British cities and towns, women reported getting tattooed in tobacco shops, newspaper shops, sweet shops, shooting galleries, and professional tattoo shops. The women who could afford it paid for their own tattoos, though some were paid for by friends or “male companions”. The going rate for a small tattoo could be a little as threepence, while a detailed piece by the famed tattooist Sutherland MacDonald, on the other hand, could cost upwards of 20 pounds. These artful works by skilled tattooers would have been out of reach for the average factory worker in Lancashire or London, who would have only rarely had a shilling or two to spare.

Historians have struggled to gauge how common the practice of tattooing really was among women from across social classes, who were rarely seen in public with their arms and legs uncovered. Gordon, for one, writes that tattooing expanded as a common practice among women across Britain in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, tattoos became something of a fad in Britain and the U.S. by the turn of the century. They were so ubiquitous that tattoo machines were advertised and sold in store catalogues, alongside toys, games, and other novelty items. And the so-called craze was not only popular among sailors and lower-class men and women in port cities like Liverpool. Wealthy Britons and London society women were getting inked too. Sutherland MacDonald, for example, set up shop in a basement in fashionable Piccadilly in central London, where he claimed he even tattooed a countess or two.

Unlike her elite counterparts, the lower-class woman could not always hide her tattoo(s) – nor would she have necessarily wanted to. Many imprisoned women recounted frustrating encounters as they sought work in factories, laundries, and domestic service. Prospective employers, the women claimed, thought their tattoos made them ‘too unclean, low, and untrustworthy’ to be good workers according to Gordon. Despite the seeming ubiquity of tattoos across social classes, Gordon and other contemporaries insisted that European and British sex workers and other “loose women” were those most frequently tattooed. Unsurprisingly, before my encounter with Gordon’s writing, I had only ever come across one tattooed woman in my research on working class London: Kate Conway, a Whitechapel resident better known as Jack the Ripper’s forth victim. Newspapers from October 1888 widely reported that Conway, who was incorrectly identified as a sex worker after her death, had her ex-partner’s initials (‘T.C.’) tattooed on her forearm.

These links between prostitution and tattoos were grounded in and popularised by Cesare Lombroso, the Italian doctor often touted as the founder of criminology who saw tattoos as a definitive marker of a person’s ‘criminal character’. This absence of moral character, Lombroso asserted, could be easily identified by physiological traits like a smaller ‘cranial capacity’ and ‘anomalous ears’. Similarly, Lombroso and his contemporaries across Europe viewed the ‘common prostitute’ as a permanent identity embodied by a particular kind of lower-class and morally suspect woman. By the logic of the normative discourses of the day, it made perfect sense that a sex worker already marked by atavism and deviance would be tattooed and thus permanently legible as a criminal.

Contemporary investigators like Gordon often made conclusions about their subjects’ motivations for getting tattooed through the lens of other gender and class stereotypes. For example, observers frequently suggested that tattoos resulted from a thoughtless decision or impulse. Among young girls, in particular, the tattoo expressed her “folly” and vulnerability to influence and imitation. And yet, several of the women that Gordon spoke to got tattoos ‘in order that they might recall themselves to a partner, or in fulfilment of some pledge or compact’. It should go without saying that these imprisoned women held widely varying and very personal reasons for their decisions.

While prisoners’ tattoos shed considerable light on contemporary attitudes towards sex work, women’s bodies, and criminality, these tattoos are especially compelling for the clues they present about their bearers’ personalities, values, and personal histories. ‘Tattooed symbols,’ Gordon writes, ‘represent the same sentiments as do the photos, tokens, keepsakes among people who can afford them’. We might imagine a woman grieving the loss of a lover who decided to cement their memory with a heart and their name. Another girl may have chosen a butterfly from a sheet of flash tattoo designs, feeling moved to adorn herself with something delicate and beautiful, to make her stand out despite the drab attire of dark woollen jackets and long skirts. Another woman may have been inspired by her coworkers on the factory floor to seek out her own marking, to assert her solidarity with her comrades. These personal decisions are part of larger, often hidden stories about love, memory, desire, anxiety, and belonging.

Tattooed symbols ultimately remind us that, despite barriers imposed by poverty and contemporary expectations of modesty and thrift, lower-class women took and active role in crafting their appearance as part of their identities in the early twentieth century. They curled their hair, bought or rented beautiful hats, and they had hearts, flowers, and initials tattooed on their skin. Beauty, bodily adornment, and self-expression were not the exclusive domain of the elite. Women at the margins of British, urban society took part in the making of their own identity and presentation too.