Saturday, October 10, 2015

Tattooing Among Civilized People

Robert Fletcher - Tattooing Among Civilized People (1883)

HathiTrust direct link
Open Library main page

(The Open Library / Archive.org scan is incomplete so I linked to a HathiTrust scan of the original journal.  You won't be able to download unless connected to a member library but anybody can read and it's not that long.)

An anthropologist looks at tattooing back when half the people you know didn't have one.  He briefly covers the history, techniques, indelibility and legal issues then gets to charts about parts of the body tattooed, ages first performed and the designs.  ("Religious designs are more frequent among Italians and Spaniards than among Frenchmen.")  I can't help but wish he hadn't dismissed with no further comment a large number as "obscenities which beggar description".