Skins & Needles

Wartime is boomtime for tattooing.

When war came, Britons flocked to London's Waterloo Road to have regimental marks or "I Love Flossie Forever" needled into their skins. Air Raid Precaution women wanted ARP on their arms. One ambulance driver selected a bracelet with her name and address.

Honolulu had only one tattooist during World War I. Today it has 18 in seven tattoo shops (run by one Jap, two Chinese, four Filipinos). For a while they thrived on a new design: "Remember Pearl Harbor," with a bomb about to drop on the words and "December Seventh" on either side of the bomb. But last week they said that U.S. sailors were returning to old favorites such as hula-hula girls, a ship framed with palm trees above "Hawaii" or "Aloha."

In San Diego the most marked difference detween popular brands of World Wars I and II is the tendency to abandon women, lean instead towards insignia such as the tin-helmeted bulldogs symbolic of the Marine Corps. A grinning death's head with an aviator's flight helmet surmounted by a black cat is popular among service flyers. In San Francisco last week sailors were still asking for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, but social-security numbers are more popular.

Covering Up. On the East Coast the services seem more conservative. In Norfolk, Tattooist Arthur B. ("Cap'n Dan") Coleman, who has had the same shop for 25 years, finds sailors still wanting girls covered with flags; eagles; anchors with fouled lines. Baltimore's Norwegian Tattooist Einar ("Tattoo Bill") Kluge said last week: "Business isn't as good as it was in the last war, but it's good. . . . Women run to initials, roses and butterflies on the arm and leg, stand up to it better than men, who sometimes faint. As for the Marines, it's always the same--they all want 'Semper Fidelis.' "

Boston's E. W. ("Dad") Liberty, in the skin game for 45 years, claims he had the Duke of Windsor, then Prince of Wales, among his estimated 65,000 clients. Much of Dad's recent work has been changing Japanese ladies into Chinese.

Out of the Tomb. The earliest known tattooed human was an Egyptian mummy excavated from a tomb marked 2000 B.C. The Japanese are said to have practiced the art for nearly 2,500 years. It has been known to Christianity since the 13th Century, when the Crusaders returned tattooed from the Holy Land. Probably responsible for tattooing's popularity among sailors was Captain Cook, who in 1769 wrote of the custom among South Sea Islanders.

In the 1870s P. T. Barnum picked up one Georgius Constantine, a Greek from Albania, not one quarter inch of whose body was clear of designs. Claiming that he had been covered from top to toe in

Burma "as a cruel punishment lasting three months and administered by six tattooers," Constantine had 388 designs on his body, 52 on his abdomen and buttocks alone. In addition to two crowned sphinxes, two serpents, two swans and one horned owl, he had genuine Oriental writing between his fingers which branded him as "the greatest rascal and thief in the world." But he was not much more elaborately illustrated than England's onetime army officer, Zebra Man Omi (see cut), who sports a 150-hour job by London's tattooist George Burchett.

Present machine methods of tattooing (first used by one Samuel F. O'Reilly of New York in 1892) are less painful, far faster than oldtime techniques. The electrically driven needles are dipped in ink, puncture the skin at the rate of 3,000 jabs a minute. The smaller designs of Manhattan's Charlie Wagner usually take from ten to 30 minutes, cost two-bits to a dollar. The widespread notion that tattooing is indelible is fallacious. In the past, the superstitious have tried to obliterate it with vinegar, stale urine, mother's milk, pigeon's excrement. Today 18 methods are successful, but all are slow.

One little-known custom in the world of tattoo is the collection of tattooed skin from cadavers. Los Angeles' tattooist Harry V. Lawson had several samples framed on his walls. That Manhattan's Charlie Wagner cannot boast of such an array may be accounted for by the fact, noted a decade ago by Albert Parry in his book Tattoo, "that in New York the supply of tattooed human skin is cornered by a certain gentleman of leisure who collects the samples for a hobby. . . . He knows a first-rate tattoo when he sees one, approaches the bearer, and signs an agreement with him in re skin-delivery after the man's death. ... He is without doubt the only living human with a constant corner in epithelia."

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