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Tattoo History Mystery
Images cut out of library books have always fascinated me. Beyond the basic “What *was* that image anyway?”, follow up questions like “So why did someone steal the image” lead to flights of fantasy...
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Disney’s Tattooed “Princess”
This morning while multitasking parenting and a group project meeting at my house, my daughter asked if she could watch the Disney movie, Pocahontas. I wavered, not wanting to cave in to...
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Double-takes…
I always get a cheap thrill when I notice a tattoo motif referenced in two different historical academic publications. It makes me think of issues that range from shared scholarship to lazy research to...
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Flash Art of Amund Dietzel
I had the pleasure of taking a quick day trip up to Milwaukee on a crisp and sunny fall day to see the special exhibit Tattoo: Flash Art of Amund Dietzel at the Milwaukee Art Museum before it closed. I...
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Book review: Last of the Bowery Scab Merchants
I had promised book reviews when I started up Tattoo History Occasionally a few months ago. So…with the holiday giving season ramping up, I thought I’d start to crank some of these out (I have a large...
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Book Review: Drawing with Great Needles
If you have an interest in tattoo history, you must add Drawing with Great Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America to your book collection. I can’t emphasize this enough! In it, editors...
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A History-Assisting Historian? Helping Lyle Tuttle Tattoo on 7 Continents!
I just got back from a trip to Antarctica with the storied tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle. Slightly over a year ago at a convention, a little bird mentioned to me that Lyle wanted to visit Antarctica so he...
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Lyle Tuttle Antarctica 2014 Press Release
Official press release out for the Lyle Tuttle Antarctica 2014 project. After 2 1/2 weeks of seeing if anyone could refute the claim that he’s the first to tattoo on all 7 continents, I’m ready to call...
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The Cook Myth: Common Tattoo History Debunked
Tracking the origins of tattoo-history myths is a favorite pastime of mine. So many abound and continually get perpetuated. A recent thread on my personal Facebook page (posted to public so you can...
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The Melodramatic Nostalgia of Tattoo Reporting
On Saturday I presented a paper at the 2014 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association annual conference (on what ended up being quite a solid panel with my fellow tattoo-scholar friends...
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TED-Ed Does Tattoo History…Sigh
I recently came across the new TED-Ed “The history of tattoos” animation piece by Addison Anderson. Given that he is not someone I’ve ever come across as a tattoo history expert in my many years of...
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Happy 2nd Anniversary Tattoo History Daily!
In thinking of what might be a good image for Tattoo History Daily’s second anniversary, I scanned my image database to find something celebratory. This image of two people clinking glasses jumped out...
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Tattoo Business Historical Survey and Baseline
Four recent tattoo projects with which I have been involved acutely highlighted the need for better analytical data to understand how tattooing has changed over time. In all of them, I was tasked with...
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A Dozen Questions to Ask When Writing About Tattoo History and Culture
Attention all who write or might want to write about tattoo history and/or culture! (This includes journalists, bloggers, academics, and more…) Here’s a handy list of a dozen questions to ask yourself...
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Justin Trudeau Joins the Ranks of the World’s Tattooed Leaders
I’ll preface this post by saying I know absolutely nothing about Canada’s new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, other than the fact that last night my Facebook feed was flooded with images of his toned,...
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Tattooing in the Travels of Marco Polo
I was recently at one of my favorite annual book fairs in Chicago, the Newberry Library’s sale of donated books to support their collections, hunting for volumes I might want to add to the tattoo...
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Custom Tattoo Work—Historical Improvisation During William Lithgow’s 1612...
Travel narratives about Holy-Land pilgrimage tattoos are one of my go-to evidence banks for demonstrating the significant presence and visibility of tattooing in the early modern period (defined as...
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Spectacle Over Scholarship: Three Museum Tattoo Exhibits
Part 1: A Long Overdue Tattoo-Exhibit Critique I so very much wanted to be able to write a positive review of the Field Museum of Chicago’s version of the tattoo exhibition that was put together by the...
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Tattooed Transculturites–Read My PhD Tattoo-History Dissertation Online
My dear fans and followers, a gift from me to you for the new year: I’ve put my PhD dissertation, Tattooed Transculturites: Western Expatriates Among Amerindian and Pacific Islander Societies,...
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Tattoo History and Digital Humanities
I’ve been more than a bit absent from actively publishing tattoo-history related research and news on both this website and its companion social media accounts. If you’re curious as to why, I decided...
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