Bodies of Subversion

Bodies of Subversion:
A Secret History of Women and Tattoo
THIRD EDITION
by Margot Mifflin
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To be released: January 2013
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S e c r e t
H i s to r y
Bodies of Subversion
A
o f W o m e n
a n d Ta t t o o
by M a r g o t M i f f l i n
Brooklyn, NY
contents
2
Skin
...............................................................
Author’s Note
...............................................
10
............................................
54
..........
72
...................................
101
...........................................................
148
...............................................................
152
Totem and Tattoo : The 80s and 90s
The New Millennium
Sources
Index
9
............
Circus Ladies and Society Women
The 70s Revivial
4
Acknowledgments
......................................
159
5
Skin
In a culture where surfaces matter, skin, the largest
organ, is the scrim on which we project our greatest
fantasies and deepest fears about our bodies. Expose
too much of it, and religious fundamentalists will
come after you. Pierce or brand it, and you assume the
uniform of the counterculture. Nip and tuck it through
surgery, and you drink from the fountain of youth or
buy into the beauty myth.
Skin houses the network of nerve endings that
connect us to pain and pleasure, and it’s the casing
that protects us from bacteria and disease. Our sense
of touch inhabits its flaky top layer, the epidermis, and
a second layer, the dermis, holds the ink and ash that
tattooed people have used to decorate themselves
for more than 5,000 years. Skin is expressive: it bears
our unique pore patterns and fingerprints, and
registers temperature (through chills and hot flashes)
and emotion (through blushing, blanching, and
goose bumps).
For women, skin is a work in progress through
which we celebrate—and denigrate—ourselves: we
shave our legs to achieve a childlike smoothness and
smear makeup on our faces to enhance our adult
sexuality; we bleach and pluck our facial hair and buy
expensive creams designed to “repair” the skin and
“reverse” the effects of aging. White women tan it;
women of color bleach it; young women cut and scar
it as a way of managing emotional pain.
No form of skin modification is as layered with
meaning as tattooing, especially for women. Tattooed
women of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries flouted
Victorian ideals of feminine purity and decorum,
gradually peeling them away like so many starched
undergarments. Tattoos appeal to contemporary
women both as emblems of empowerment in an era of
feminist gains and as badges of self-determination at a
time when controversies about abortion rights, date
rape, and sexual harassment have made them think hard
about who controls their bodies—and why. For these
women, the significance of a tattoo can lie in the mere
act of getting inked (as a form of rebellion or a way of
reclaiming the body after rape or sexual abuse) or in the
timing (to commemorate milestones such as marriage or
divorce, or in remembrance of dead friends or relatives).
PREVIOUS SPREAD Maud Stevens Wagner, the first known Western female tattooist, 1911.
Collection of the author. OPPOSITE Circus attraction Betty Broadbent at the 1939 World’s
Fair, in the first televised beauty contest. Courtesy New York Daily News.
11
Circus Ladies and
Society Women
The mother of all tattooed circus ladies, 22-year-old
Nora Hildebrandt arrived at Bunnell’s Museum in
New York in March of 1882 to display her 365 designs,
tattooed by her father as a means of torture, she said,
after they were captured by Indians in the Wild West.
She’d been attacked by the Sioux, menaced by Sitting
Bull, orphaned, saved by the legendary general George
Crook, blinded and cured, and now she appeared in a
museum of curiosities, scandalously dressed, to show
her skin and describe her harrowing ordeal. Her story
was unbelievable. And it was pure fiction.
Hildebrandt was tattooed not, as she claimed,
under threat of death by Sitting Bull, but by her
common law husband, Martin Hildebrandt, a German
immigrant who began tattooing in 1846 and worked
as an itinerant artist during the Civil War, inking
soldiers in both Union and Confederate camps. In
RIGHT Nora Hildebrandt, late 1880s. Photo courtesy Tattoo Archive. OPPOSITE Nora
Hildebrandt, early 1880s. Photographer Charles Eisenmann opened his studio on New York’s
Lower East Side in 1879. He documented entertainers in beer halls, theaters, and dime museums, including tattooed ladies Irene Woodward, Mary Brooks, Annie Howard, Lotta Pictoria,
Miss Lulu, Princess Beatrice, and Trixie Richardson, sometimes posing them in the same
necklace Hildebrandt wears here. Courtesy Ronald G. Becker Collection of Charles Eisenmann
Photographs, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.
Circus Ladies and Society Women
Circus Ladies and Society Women
18
19
Circus Ladies and Society Women
55
The 70s
Revival
With the sexual revolution of the 60s, when feminists
began casting off their bras as they had their corsets
a half-century earlier, tattoos were rescued from ignominy and resurrected in the counterculture by women
who were rethinking womanhood. The arrival of “the
pill” in 1961 allowed women greater sexual independence; Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 book, Sex and
the Single Girl, promoted sexual self-determination;
and a little over a decade later, legalized abortion
secured women’s control of their reproductive futures. In 1971, the international bestseller Our Bodies
Ourselves became the first book written exclusively by
women about women’s health and sexuality, addressing a number of previously taboo topics including
orgasm, postpartum depression, and bisexuality. Not
surprisingly, newly empowered women in this period
started using tattoos to reflect their changing sense
of self. Women like Marcia Rasner began to see tattoos
differently during this time. “When I was a girl, even
men with tattoos were sleazeballs,” says Rasner. “And
if a woman had a tattoo she was the worst of the worst.
I got married straight out of high school in 1966 and
tried to be the straight housewife, and it didn’t work.
Five years later I dropped into the hippie generation.
I got talking to this woman [in a bar] one night and
she had this beautiful rose tattooed on her hand and
it stopped me—I thought, she’s saying something
about herself there. I stepped aside from my prejudice
and looked in this woman’s eyes and saw the person
that was in there. That was my first experience with a
tattoo. And after that I just started noticing them.”
Janis Joplin was one of the first celebrities to nudge
tattoo toward the mainstream by showing her wrist
piece—a Florentine bracelet she had drawn herself—
in public and in photo shoots. She was tattooed by
San Francisco artist Lyle Tuttle, who recalls, “I put a
heart on her chest, and the day after her death there
was a girl standing in front of the shop wanting the
heart I put on her, in remembrance. Hundreds of them
got the same idea at the same time.”
The wristlet, Joplin told Rolling Stone, was for
“everybody” and the heart was “for me and my friends.
OPPOSITE Janis Joplin, May 1970, showing the bracelet she said she designed herself, tattooed by Lyle Tuttle. © Greg Peterson/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis.
Just a little treat for the boys,
like icing on the cake.” Joplin
showed the tattoo on The Dick
Cavett Show in 1970 (months
before her death) explaining that after Tuttle tattooed
her she invited him to a party
where he tattooed 18 people.
Tuttle, who also tattooed Joan
Baez and Cher, among other
celebrities, credits the women’s movement with reversing
the medium’s postwar decline.
“With women getting a newfound freedom, they could get
tattooed if they so desired. It
increased and opened the market by 50% of the population,”
Tuttle told Prick magazine. And,
he said, they changed the nature of the medium: “The women made tattooing a softer and
kinder art form.”
But if the ranks of tattooed
women were suddenly swelling, the number of female
artists was not. When Sheila
May began working in her
husband’s Kenosha, Wisconsin
shop in 1966 at age 19, she
knew of only a single female
competitor: Painless Nell. It
would be nearly 10 years before May began hearing about
other women artists.
“It was radical, there was
no getting around that,” says
May. “I don’t know that I had
a feminist attitude about it; I’ve
just always been a person who
went out and did whatever
appealed to me. Guys would
come up to the shop and I’d
see them outside the window
The 70s Revival
The 70s Revival
and you’d hear one say to the other, ‘Oh my God—
look! There’s a broad in there doing that!’”
In 1977, May opened an appointment-only shop
in L.A. that catered to women. “I would say about
half the men [I worked on] got tattooed just to get
tattooed, whereas almost all the women were getting
a tattoo for a reason,” says May. Men’s standard
repertoire—maritime imagery, military insignia, birds
of prey, or slogans such as the biker motto “FTW” (Fuck
the World)—advertised social status or affiliations,
while women preferred decorative natural imagery
and often got tattooed to mark a personal transition.
“Some did it just because they thought it was pretty,”
says May, “but usually there was some symbolism.”
May didn’t consider herself an artist, but she
was an innovator of sorts: she used pastel colors
and softened her imagery by eliminating the black
outlines typically used for definition. In 1981,
she began specializing in cosmetic tattooing.
Historically, tattooists who did permanent makeup—
and they went back to Martin Hildebrandt—left
their customers with clownish splotches of rouge or
solid black eyebrows. May had a subtler touch, but
her colleagues wrongly warned her she would never
make a living at it. Now, using delicate needlework,
she applies natural-looking color to lips, eyes and
brows as a cosmetic tattooist to the stars. James
Brown, for one, had May to thank for his eyebrows.
In the early 70s, when May was still in Wisconsin,
West Coast artists with fine arts training, led by artist,
historian, and (now) clothing franchise magnate Ed
Hardy and the tattooist Cliff Raven, were refining
their art by experimenting with Japanese motifs
that legendary Honolulu artist Sailor Jerry Collins
had imported to the States a decade earlier. Steeped
in the Japanese tradition, which favors bright
colors and interlocked imagery framed by wind,
waves, or flowers, their work generated a tattoo
renaissance still flourishing today. What’s been
called the International Folk Style—anchors, eagles,
and pin-ups crowded helter-skelter onto backs and
shoulders—was superseded by a more deliberate
and coherent design concept.
Inspired by an article about Raven’s work, Vyvyn
56
57
Lazonga—one of the most influential women in the
field—broke in by apprenticing with Danny Danzl, a
retired merchant seaman in Seattle, in 1972. “Danny
showed me everything he knew,” says Lazonga, who
had been drawing since she was a child. “The first few
years were great. Everyone thought it was so unique
to have this young woman tattooing. But after that it
was much harder.”
Lazonga, who says she didn’t “get” the women’s
movement at the time, found her feminist
consciousness raised once she hit the glass ceiling
in Danzl’s shop. She watched many less experienced
men being groomed and promoted over her and was
often forced to use shoddy, albeit daintily customized,
equipment: Danzl couldn’t be bothered to repair
Lazonga’s broken machines, but he did find time to
lovingly inlay them with glittering fake jewels.
“There was sexism and prejudice and I resented it,”
Lazonga says flatly. “I had to use faulty equipment and
I just felt jealous. The springs on the machine broke
every week and I wasn’t allowed to change them [so]
I wasn’t able to do good work. It was a battle with
OPPOSITE ABOVE Vyvyn Lazonga in front of her first shop, Seattle, 1979. Courtesy Lazonga.
OPPOSITE BELOW Tattoo by Vyvyn Lazonga. Courtesy Lazonga. BELOW Calamity Jane (Jane
Nemhauser), 1979. Two years before this photo was taken she chose a career in tattooing
over cabinetmaking. “Tattooing was a mystical underground art, a subculture not available
to just anybody,” she says. “Like my mother, who was a pilot in WWII, I was not out to prove
anything. I’m just a tomboy.” Courtesy Calamity Jane.
The 70s Revival
Danny to get better technology, but eventually I did.”
Despite such obstacles, “Madam Lazonga’s”
novelty as a tattoo artist and a heavily tattooed
woman provided an opening for her in the tattoo
world. No one could question her commitment: she
shocked even tattoo insiders by getting sleeves (full
arm pieces) in the early 70s. Primarily because of three
phoenixes—Hardy’s handiwork—that extended from
her right shoulder to her left thigh, she was voted “Most
Beautifully Tattooed Woman in the World” at the 1978
World Tattoo Convention. But there were sour notes as
well: male tattooists snubbed Lazonga at conventions,
and although men enjoyed being tattooed by a
woman, she was routinely ridiculed. “How’d you like to
fuck a thing like that,” she remembers one loiterer in
Danzl’s parlor muttering to his gaping friends. “Now,”
she says, “I don’t let people like that in my shop.”
It was on the merits of her artistry, not her novelty,
however, that Lazonga ultimately made her name.
In 1979, she opened her own shop, and has since
become known for Japanese, art deco, and Victorian
floral patterns that follow the natural curves of the
body and enhance rather than cover bare skin.
“Women are masters of illusion,” Lazonga told Skin and
Ink magazine. “They always have been with makeup
and clothing. A tattoo is just part of that illusion.”
While men chose visible areas for their designs,
women chose “sensual” areas like the breast, lower
stomach, rear, and sometimes the crotch, according to
tattooist Spider Webb’s book Pushing Ink: The Fine Art
of Tattooing. “Women tend to approach tattooing with
an attitude of greater reserve,” Webb observed. “They
do it more for their own delight than to show the thing
off…Men often go into a peacock syndrome and get
tattoos which will be visible indiscriminately while
women often get tattoos to show to special people.”
Unlike Lazonga, who began tattooing with little
formal art training, New Yorker Ruth Marten came
to it after studying at Boston’s Museum School, also
starting in 1972. “I had to come up with some way
to support myself, and I thought that this was the
ultimate drawing surface,” she says. “It appealed to
me, so I bought myself a little kit.” Like many selftaught tattooists, she learned by practicing on
100
artist with a scratchy voice and a trashy look appeared on the new reality show Miami Ink in 2005
and started working her black and gray style for
the cameras, the unimaginable happened. Kat Von
D quickly became the single best known tattooist,
male or female, in the world.
n
The New
Millennium
What changed? Almost everything. The internet opened
the door to a smorgasbord
of designs and techniques
that fed a hungry young generation of artists. Hundreds of
women around the globe took
up the trade and started their
own shops. Reality TV shows
brought tattooing into middle
class living rooms and showcased many quality women
artists, starting with the gamechanging Kat Von D. The chick
spot became the tramp stamp
and lost its charm. Arm bands
went out; rib and hip tattoos
came in. Color got better and
tattoos got bigger. Trade tattoos celebrated cooking, sewing, hairdressing, graphic design, and the sciences. A Utah
mother auctioned off ad space
OPPOSITE AND ABOVE Artist Jo Harrison is known for her exquisite use of color. “I like
to use fusion inks mostly, “she says,“ and I love the Cheyenne Hawk tattoo machine
for color. I think the choice of colors you put next to each other is very important, cold
against warm and dark against bright or light. Then it’s just a case of being meticulous
with the blending going the full spectrum of tone.” Photos courtesy Harrison.
on her forehead, earning $10,000 to pay for her
son’s education; her scarlet
letter is a poorly tattooed
domain name advertising
a casino: Goldenpalace.
com. In the bestselling
novel, The Girl With the
Dragon Tattoo, the first
famously inked literary
heroine used a tattoo machine to brand her abuser,
then hacked her way (via
computer) through this
feminist revenge story and
onto the big screen, in two
major films.
Some things didn’t
change: The fine arts world
continued to ignore the
sweeping technical, stylistic, and conceptual developments of 21st-century
The New Millennium
tattooing. Tattoo magazines
didn’t, but loaded their pages
with so much brain-deadening
soft porn that it was hard to see
the tattoos for the sleaze. And
despite the relentless cheesecakery of women in the tattoo media—as in the media at
large—women exerted a powerful force in the industry. After
tattooing was legalized in New
York in 1997, the city exploded
with new shops.
Women entrepreneurs and
artists like Leven of New York Adorned, Andrea Elston
(artist/co-founder with Leven of East Side Ink), and
Michelle Myles (artist/co-founder of Dare Devil
Tattoo) helped put New York tattooing on the map
as it came up from underground. Women-run shops
sprang up across the country. A high number of top
notch lesbian artists emerged. And middle-aged
pioneers including Julia Alphonso, Debbie Kienel,
102
Pat Sinatra, and Debbie Lenz
taught their children to tattoo.
For those invested in elevating tattooing to the level of
fine art, a considerable gap in
the media landscape hindered
progress: there was no criticism. Tattoo magazines in the
U.S. and the U.K. ran features
and interviews, but rarely analysis and never reviews. Artists
were anointed merely by being
covered, and aesthetic evaluation usually came down to
gauging authenticity: Had the artist studied the tribal
art he or she practiced? Was the combination of styles
or improvisation on a style true to the folk lexicon?
And always: Would the tattoo hold?
Deeper conceptual questions were neglected:
how does one evaluate this uniquely embodied art
form crossbred from design, decorative art, and fine
art, created for a single buyer, incapable of being
ABOVE Author and lawyer Marisa Kakoulas, showing tattoos by Daniel DiMattia. Photo by David Kimelberg. BELOW Craft themed tattoos have become popular over the past decade. BELOW
LEFT Embroidery tattoo by Scott Osburn on embroidery artist Shannon Genova-Scudder. Photo by Randy Scudder. BELOW CENTER Dressmaker’s dummy by Rose Hardy. Courtesy Hardy.
BELOW RIGHT Brittny Cole was tattooed by Mez Love in honor of her grandmother, Zola Rae, whose name is “sewn” into the tattoo. Courtesy Cole.
103
resold or permanently displayed,
historically limited to a narrow
iconography, bound, in Western tradition, by its lower class
origins, and culturally wedded
to its subcultural status? Even
as tattoo art began to jump the
rails of its own historical track,
arriving in upscale shops and
practiced by art school graduates, these rich avenues of inquiry went unexplored. Art critics didn’t care to pursue them;
tattoo writers didn’t think to.
In 2005, when a tattooed
writer named Marisa Kakoulas
started the blog Needled.com
(She now owns NeedlesandSins.
com), the discourse leapt to a
lively new level of sophistication. A 38-year-old lawyer with
both graduate journalism and
law degrees, Kakoulas combined ABOVE Tattoo by Rose Hardy, courtesy Hardy. BELOW Animals dressed
reportorial smarts with a willing- as humans are a new trend for women. Dog by Virginia Elwood. Bird by
ness to analyze tattooing artisti- Inma. Deer by Saira Hunjan. Photos courtesy the artists.
The New Millennium
cally and sociologically, but not,
as many writers outside the industry were doing, academically.
Immersed in New York’s tattoo
culture from the time she was a
teenager, Kakoulas understood
both the value and limits of tradition, defending Western tattoo’s folk roots while exploring
its conceptual possibilities and
questioning its social relevance.
A post on Martin Luther King
Day, for example lamented the
low popularity of King tattoos
compared to portraits of rapper
Old Dirty Bastard. She has analyzed and even named new genres on her blog and in her books.
And her writing is unabashedly
feminist. She spoofed Inked
magazine’s “Girl of the Day” pinups by running a series called
’”Objectified Tattooed Men,” for
“gals and gays,” and drew submissions through an appeal that
Bodies of Subversion:
A Secret History of Women and Tattoo
Text © 2013 Margot Mifflin
All photos © their respective owners, used here with permission.
Front cover: Sabaa tattooed by Roxx. Courtesy Roxx.
Back cover: Top Row, left to right: Artoria Gibbons. Courtesy Circus World Museum, Baraboo,
Wisconsin; Nora Hildebrandt, late 1880s. Photo courtesy Tattoo Archive; Maud Stevens Wagner.
Collection of the author; Unknown circus attraction. Courtesy Circus World Museum, Baraboo,
Wisconsin. Bottom Row, left to right: Model Lacy Soto. Photo by Miss Missy; Natasha Lyons, tattooed
by Stephanie Tamez. Courtesy Tamez; Tattooed biker. Courtesy Marilyn Stemp, IronWorks Magazine;
Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. Photo by Alice Gossler.
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