INK ME NOT
Why Margaret Mountford was right to tell the Sunday Times that tattoos carry a ‘stigma’
What do Dame Judy Dench, famous actress, and Carl Frampton, featherweight boxing champion, have in common? A Latin tattoo. In her case, this is carpe diem on the right wrist, an 80th birthday present from her daughter; in his, veni vidi vici on his right pectoral muscle, acquired when he was 18 and clearly not lacking in self-confidence.
Perhaps it is not surprising that my comment in a Sunday Times interview a few months ago – that young people did not enhance their job prospects by having visible tattoos – gave rise to adverse reaction and even incredulity. How could I say that, when so many people have them? And in these days of David Beckham’s sleeves and Samantha Cameron’s dolphin, I almost began to wonder whether I was right. When I was a child, tattoos were most commonly seen on the arms of sailors and labourers; now they are a fashion item. Was mine just an old-fashioned view?
The word “tattoo” first appears in English in the mid 17th century, meaning an evening drum or bugle signal, or a military entertainment, as in the “Edinburgh tattoo”, and comes from the Dutch tap toe, meaning a closed tap on a cask or barrel. Tattoo meaning “a design marked on the skin by pricking in indelible dyes” is a later arrival, known from the late 18th century and derived from Tahitian, Tongan or Samoan ta-tau, or the Marquesan ta-tu: we have Captain Cook to thank for that.
Despite the relatively recent origin of the word in English, tattooing and tattoos were known in the Old World as early as the late Neolithic era. The tattoos of “Ötzi”, the Ice Man, whose body was discovered frozen in a glacier in the Tyrol in 1991, may have been therapeutic - an attempt to cure arthritis (anyone in Glasgow seeking a tattoo today can call in at Otzi Tattoos). A thousand years later, in 11th dynasty Egypt, where fish bones were used to pierce the skin, tattoos had an erotic significance. So why did we need the South Sea Islanders to give us a word to describe a technique known for millennia? And what was the Greek view of it?
Herodotus wrote that, for the Thracians, tattooing was a sign of noble birth. They used all-over body tattoos as an adornment, as did the Mossynoikoi encountered by Xenophon’s Ten Thousand. Many Attic vase-paintings show Thracian women with spiral or deer-shaped tattoos. Thracian women also bloodied their arms with letters for Orpheus (views differ as to whether this was a punishment for killing him or a sign of mourning his death).
Tattoos also had religious significance. According to Herodotus, runaway slaves with sacred marks tattooed on their skin who managed to reach a temple of Heracles in the Delta in Egypt could not be removed from the temple. Herodotus also recorded perhaps the most ingenious ancient use of tattooing. Histiaeus of Miletus, he writes, wanted to send a secret message from Susa to his son-in-law Aristagoras, telling him to rebel against the Persian king. So he shaved the head of a loyal slave, tattooed the message on his scalp, waited for the hair to grow back, then sent him with instructions for the recipient to shave his head and read what was written on it: an effective, if long-term strategy.
The ancient Greeks were no strangers to tattooing, therefore, but they did not use it for ornament. For them, tattoos were punitive, used to identify runaway slaves, prisoners of war and possibly even criminals. The Greeks may have learned this from the Persians (the Thebans who deserted to the Persians after Thermopylae were tattooed with the “king’s marks”, a more effective punishment than Xerxes’ attempt to “tattoo” the Hellespont when his bridge was destroyed), although a late 6th century BC vase in Vienna (Vienna 3722) shows Dike (justice) defeating an ugly and tattooed Adikia (injustice), by hitting her with a mallet. Whether Adikia’s tattoos signified a wrong-doer or a foreigner is not clear. In Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, we read that after Athens’ defeat at Syracuse, most the Athenians held prisoner in the quarries died, but some were enslaved, and these had a horse tattooed on their foreheads.
That the Greeks associated tattooing particularly with slaves is shown by references throughout the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Tattooed runaway slaves will be “mottled francolins” in the Cloudcuckooland of Aristophanes Birds; in his Frogs, meanwhile, Pluto threatens to tattoo Cleophon and others and put them in fetters if they don’t come to him quickly. In his defence against charges of treason brought by Demosthenes, Aeschines accused his attacker of being more slave than freedman - all but tattooed as a slave. In the 3rd century BC, in Herodas’ 5th mime, a character with a Thracian name is ordered to bring the tattoo artist, needles, and ink to tattoo an unfaithful lover, who happens to be a slave.
For the Greeks, then, a tattoo meant degradation. They used the verb stizein, to prick or sting, to describe the tattooing process, and its cognate noun, stigma, to describe the result. “Stigma” took on the connotation it has today in English, of a permanent mark of disgrace or infamy.
The use of tattoos on slaves continued into the Roman period. In Petronius’ Satyricon, Encolpius and Giton hide by having their faces covered with the inscription of runaway slaves: tene me ne fugiam. Suetonius tells us that Caligula marked men from good families with tattoos and put them to work on the roads or in the mines.
The metaphorical meaning of stigmata as the marks of the five wounds inflicted on Christ on the Cross, associated first with St Francis, derives from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in which he wrote that he bore on his body the marks (stigmata) of Jesus. He is thought to have meant both actual marks caused by stoning at Lystra, and, figuratively, a tattoo, showing him to be a slave of Christ.
Later, the use of the tattoo was extended to soldiers. Aetius, writing medical texts in the 6th century AD, gives instructions for creating and removing tattoos. He suggests that tattoos existed on the hands of soldiers, presumably to identify their legion or cohort, and also to identify them as deserters should they run away. (A century earlier, Vegetius had recommended waiting until recruits had passed their initial training before tattooing them). No doubt tattoos were used for all these purposes because they were so difficult to remove; as today, the skin had to be burned using caustic materials.
Christian emperors tried to limit the tattooing of slaves. Constantine forbade tattoos on the face as it was “formed in heavenly beauty”, and suggested using the hands or calves instead. Anastasius tried to ban the process entirely, but it continued until the 9th century, then died out in the West. In many cases, it was superseded by branding. The Greeks had branded animals, but in the Roman and Byzantine periods branding was used on people, too, as it continued to be up to modern times. Tattooing itself did not recur in the west until Captain Cook came back from Tahiti.
Herodian, writing on Septimius Severus’ campaign in Britain, describes the British tattooing their bodies with coloured designs and drawings of a variety of animals, and going around naked so that their decorations were not covered. At least we haven’t reverted to that – yet. Maybe we haven’t come very far at all. How enslaved to football, we may ask, is someone with “England” tattooed across their forehead or the back of their neck? Given their associations over history, it is only reasonable to question whether tattoos might limit a person’s employment prospects. After all, who can say how many employers see tattoos as the Greeks did – as something of a ‘stigma’?
