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    Art on Skin: Tattoos, Style, and the Human Canvas
    Art on Skin: Tattoos, Style, and the Human Canvas
    Art on Skin: Tattoos, Style, and the Human Canvas
    Ebook414 pages1 hour

    Art on Skin: Tattoos, Style, and the Human Canvas

    By Nancy J. Hajeski, Marcel Brousseau, Lisa Purcell and

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    About this ebook

    A celebration of all things tattoo, this visually appealing wealth of tattoo knowledge will have you running for the nearest tattoo artist. The twenty-first century has seen a boom in tattooing, with millions of American’s23 percent of themboasting ink on their body. This popular pastime is not something to be taken lightly, as there are dozens of aspects to consider when planning your ink. Art on Skin helps with that planning by detailing the different types of art, ink, and artists that pervade the industry.

    Using striking visuals, Art on Skin showcases the beauty of the art of tattooing and aids in the choosing of a style, with detailed descriptions of the many different styles of tattoos, including fine art, cartoon characters, wildlife, and many more. The full-color photographs within these pages will leave you with dreams of your own pieces, and stories from others who have lived the tattoo experience will keep you from stumbling upon unwelcome surprises. This is the perfect book for tattoo lovers and prospective tattoo junkies of all kinds.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateAug 5, 2014
    ISBN9781629142944
    Art on Skin: Tattoos, Style, and the Human Canvas
    Author

    Nancy J. Hajeski

    Author Nancy J. Hajeski has been a birder for decades—her passion has resulted in her traveling to remote areas to look for specific species, such as raptors or wading birds; birding at wildlife sanctuaries in Florida, New Jersey, and New York; attending birding seminars, workshops, and talks at birdwatcher meetings and garden clubs; and becoming a member of the National Audubon Society. She has produced young adult nonfiction for Hammond as well as writing Ali: The Official Portrait of the Greatest of all Time and The Beatles: Here, There and Everywhere for Thunder Bay. She recently finished Complete Guide to Herbs and Spices for National Geographic. As Nancy Butler, she is the  RITA-winning author of twelve Signet Regency romances, and her graphic novel adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for Marvel spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She currently lives beside a Catskill trout stream where bald eagles and mergansers are regular visitors.

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      Book preview

      Art on Skin - Nancy J. Hajeski

      AN ANCIENT

      ART REBORN

      In the autumn of 1691, the mysteriously exotic Prince Giolo of the island of Moangis first displayed his patterned body to the learned virtuosi and persons of high quality inhabiting smoky, crowded, turn-of-the-century London. A South Sea Islander enslaved in the Philippines and eventually sold to a British merchant sailor, Prince Giolo was trumpeted as the wonder of the age for the intricate and colorful tattooing that decorated the entirety of his torso and legs. A promotional broadsheet for the Painted Prince speculated upon the wisdom and ancient learning embodied by the man’s tattoos and claimed that the magical ink rendered his skin impervious to snakebite or poison. Despite his apparent powers, the ornately ornamented prince could not withstand the ravages of smallpox, and he died within months of arriving in London.

      Nearly eighty years later, Joseph Banks, Captain James Cook’s naturalist, made the first record of Polynesian tattooing practices during the HMS Endeavor’s maiden voyage to the South Pacific. To accompany his scientific observations, Banks, along with other members of Cook’s crew, submitted his own skin to the Polynesian tattooists’ whims and sailed home forever marked. Upon the vessel’s return to Great Britain, the tales and drawings of the tattooed inhabitants of the South Seas captivated British society much as the ill-fated Prince Giolo had eighty years earlier, and body art became a small-scale fad among both well-heeled Britons and, of course, sailors.

      Prince Giolo, as depicted in a fanciful 1692 broadsheet. The Painted Prince made only a fleeting appearance in London—disease ended his difficult life shortly after he arrived in the pestilent city.

      Engraving by John Savage (1692)

      Early Eurasian Tattoos

      What eighteenth-century Britons didn’t realize was that tattooing was not a novel practice on the British Isles: a millennium earlier, their Celtic and, later, their Anglo-Saxon ancestors had customarily decorated their bodies with ceremonial and familial tattoos. Tattooing had once been common across Europe and Asia among the diverse tribal cultures that populated the vast landmass. The 1991 discovery of Ötzi the Iceman in an Alpine glacier on the Austrian-Italian border gave clear evidence that Neolithic Eurasians had marked their bodies—Ötzi’s yellowed skin, preserved in ice for more than five thousand years, bore multiple small tattoos. Numerous lines were hatched on his lower back. On the inside of his left knee, he wore a small tattooed cross; his ankles were also decorated with clusters of parallel lines. In total, the Iceman wore some fifty-seven tattoos. Their purpose remains conjecture—although some anthropologists link them to social ritual, others believe that some sort of ancient acupuncture, intended to relieve Ötzi’s aching joints, left the marks. Whatever the purpose of his tattoos, Ötzi is not alone among the ancients—both his ancestors and his descendents practiced tattooing. Archaeologists have excavated archaic bone needles and clay ink reservoirs at Paleolithic dig sites in Europe.

      The universality of tattooing is a curious subject for speculation.

      —Captain James Cook, 1775

      Eurasian tattooing became far more sophisticated during the millennia after Ötzi perished in the Alps. Tombs discovered in the steppes of southwestern Siberia in the mid- and late-twentieth century revealed remains of the Pazyryk people, who, besides excelling as skilled horsemen and fierce warriors, practiced intricate, figurative tattooing. One mummy, a sturdy male believed to be a chief, wore a menagerie of animals on his body, all distinctively rendered. His right arm hosted two mighty deer, a donkey, a ram, and a fictitious carnivorous monster. On his chest, two griffins stood in winged splendor, while on his right shin, a fish spanned from his ankle to his knee. Despite these and other elaborate designs, the Pazyryk chief also bore a row of circles along his spine, which, not unlike Ötzi’s tattoos, were probably intended as a form of physical therapy.

      Tattooing in the South Pacific consisted of an array of patterning suited to both the contours of the body and, most surprisingly to European colonizers, the face. Drawings of tattooed islanders amazed European audiences.

      Engraving © Jupiter Images

      Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

      —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871

      Universal Ink

      History reveals tattooing to be a universal human practice. Not only did the Polynesians and ancient Eurasian tribes decorate themselves with abstract designs and elaborate totems, but also the ancient Egyptians, the Inca, numerous American Indian tribes, and ancient Chinese all practiced tattooing. The famous intricacy and lushness of contemporary Japanese tattooing is a result of the culture’s long heritage of body art. When European empires began colonizing the South Seas and the New World during the Age of Exploration (from the early fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century), the inked bodies of Polynesians and American Indians should not have seemed as exotic as they did to the colonizers—Europeans might have looked that way too, had they not, centuries earlier, chosen to abandon tattooing as a social norm. What Europeans saw—proudly tattooed bodies—was a mirror of their own distant heritage before it was swayed, like everything else, by the mores of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian

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