Matt Lodder

Yeah.

Really like the kind of cliche of the tattooed sailors been around since the early 1800s.

I mean, that's sort of roughly coincident when the Royal Navy and the American Navy start recording the bodies of tattooed sailors in the first place.

And lots of tattooing was happening.

at sea sailors have got gunpowder and needles to make tattoos from so you know it's a sort of handy way to pass the time aboard ships but even you know even back then there's plenty of people who who weren't sailors and criminals getting tattooed so famously uh in the 16th and 17th century lots of pilgrims were getting tattooed

And we have a professional tattoo industry from the middle half of the 19th century onwards.

And it's largely, especially in Europe, rich people getting tattooed.

So the birth of the tattoo industry is partly inspired by George V, King George V of England, getting tattooed in Japan in 1881.

And tattooers have been sort of claiming...

a broader demographic for their practice for, as I said, for 140 years.

Although, you know, that stereotype of the tattooed sale has been quite persistent, you know.

I had a tattooer tell me once, she's like, stop telling people that like kings and aristocrats got tattooed because like that's bad for business.

Yeah, a little bit, although surprisingly really not probably as much as you'd think, at least not in the kind of non-mechanical version of tattooing.

So that guy Otzi, who I mentioned, five and a half thousand years old, he was tattooed with some friends of mine just did some research and have kind of argued that he was tattooed pretty much the same way that you would do if you got tattooed by a hand tattooer today, just a sharp needle.

Um, ink made from essentially soot from a fire and like, you know, modern mass produced black inks and yeah, like the basic technology stick a hole in the skin, put some ink in it somehow is, is pretty, pretty stable over a very long time.

Um.

I mean, the electric tattoo machine was invented in the 1890s, adapted from various other bits of early electronic or electric equipment.

So doorbells were quite famously adapted, dental drills, various other bits of kind of early Victorian technology.

And the modern tattoo machines that we have, although, you know, they're again a bit more kind of mass produced and a bit more reliable now, but the basic technology in a modern coil tattoo machine is the same as in a Victorian doorbell.

So, you know, 100 and 130, 100 and 135 years old, not a huge amount has changed.