Sailor tattoos are tattooing traditions among European and American seafarers, including naval service members and merchant mariners, and tattoo designs and styles influenced by those traditions. These practices date back to at least the 16th century among European sailors, and they spread to sailors in British colonies, including those that became the United States and Canada. People participating in these traditions have included military service members in national navies, civilian mariners on merchant ships, and fishermen. In particular, there are records of significant numbers of tattoos on U.S. Navy sailors in the American Revolution, Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Sailor tattoos have served as a form of identification, protective talismans in sailors' superstitions, records of experiences, markers of identity, and means of self-expression.
For centuries, tattooing among sailors mostly happened during downtime at sea, applied by hand with sewing needles and tattoo ink made with simple pigments such as soot and gunpowder. These informal tattooists applied a folk art vocabulary including crucifixes, heart symbols, and nautical images such as anchors, mermaids, and tall ships, along with names and initials. Starting around the 1870s, some former sailors began opening professional tattoo shops in port cities in the United States and Europe. This trend increased after the development of the electric tattoo machine in the 1890s, which enabled faster application of tattoos and more elaborate tattoo designs. Many customers of these early professional tattoo artists were sailors.
American tattoo artists in the late 1800s and early 1900s tended to offer simple designs with black outlines and limited colors, which enabled quick work. By the 1920s–1930s, some of them created and sold sets of pre-drawn designs (flash) in this style, including many maritime-inspired motifs. This style became known as American traditional (old school). This style was further popularized in subsequent decades through the work of prolific tattoo artists such as Sailor Jerry in Honolulu. After a period of fading interest, tattoo artists including Don Ed Hardy promoted a nostalgic revival of American traditional tattooing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many sea service members continue to participate in sailor tattoo traditions, and the style remains popular among the general public as well.
In creative works including literature, visual art, and advertising, sailors are often portrayed with tattoos as a distinctive sign of their profession. Tattooed sailors are sometimes used as a character archetype. Since the late 2000s, several maritime museums in the U.S. and Canada have hosted exhibits about the history of sailor tattoos and their influence on popular tattoo styles.
History
Origin
Tattooing among European sailors likely derived in part from an indigenous European tattooing tradition, reinvigorated by cultural exchange during the Age of Discovery. While tattoo, from the Polynesian root "tatau", only entered English and other European languages in the late 18th century, European sailors have practiced tattooing since at least the 16th century.
According to ethnographer Joanna White, the development of an "identifiable tattooing tradition" among sailors may be an extension of their "choice of social self-demarcation through distinctive dress and accessories." Maritime historian Ira Dye said that the sailor was proud of his profession and "wanted people to know that he went to sea." Tattoos are also practical: they help to identify the body of a drowned sailor.
18th century
Sailors in Britain and its colonies circa 1700–1750 used ink or gunpowder to create tattoos by pricking the skin and rubbing the powder into the wound. For example, in the 1720s–1730s in Virginia and Maryland, there were multiple mentions in newspapers of sailors who had blue markings on their arms, including initials and crucifixes, made with gunpowder. By 1740, seamen were recognizable at a glance by their distinctive dress and tattoos.
There is a persistent myth that tattoos on European sailors originated with Captain James Cook's crew, who were tattooed in Tahiti in 1769, but Cook brought only the word tattoo to Europeans, not the practice itself. Ira Dye wrote that "the tattooing of American (and by strong inference, European) seafarers was a common and well-established practice at the time of Cook's voyages." Scholars debate whether Cook's voyages increased the popularity of tattooing among sailors, or whether the rise of print culture and surveillance-based recordkeeping that happened around the same time made tattoos more visible in the historical record.
The U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command says that "by the late 18th century, around a third of British and a fifth of American sailors had at least one tattoo." Following the American Revolution (1765–1783), American sailors' tattoos were listed in their protection papers, an identity certificate issued to prevent impressment into the British Royal Navy. The details in these protection papers are an important source of information about tattoo practices at the time. After the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty, in the Royal Navy, lieutenant William Bligh wrote letters about 25 mutineers to help capture them and described tattoos on 21 of them. They had European-American tattoos, such as hearts, stars, dates, initials, and a triskelion, as well as Tahitian tattoos.
19th century
Sailor tattoo motifs had already solidified by the early 19th century, with anchors, ships, and other nautical symbols being the most common images tattooed on American seafarers, followed by patriotic symbols such as flags, eagles, and stars; symbols of love; and religious symbols. Sailors used similar motifs from their visual culture in other crafts at sea, such as engraving tobacco tins, scrimshaw, and coins.
Sailors were skilled with sewing needles for making and repairing sails and their clothes, and they repurposed needles for tattooing with simple inks made from soot or gunpowder. They also used India ink. Some sailors brought kits of needles and inks aboard ship to tattoo each other at sea. Herman Melville, who served in the U.S. Navy in 1843–1844, recounts:
A letter from a sailor serving aboard the USS Monitor during the American Civil War described his "old salt" shipmates as significantly tattooed:
Personnel records from the USS Adams from 1884 to 1889 show that 18% of its crew had tattoos. Rates of tattooing varied between the occupational groups aboard the ship, with 29% of men who actually sailed the ship having tattoos, compared with only 4% of men who provided specialized services, such as apothecaries and carpenters.
Historian Jane Caplan said that while French and Italian criminologists linked tattoos to criminality, tattooing was "sufficiently normalized that it attracted virtually no official or scholarly attention" among British criminologists. By the late 19th century, tattoos were common among officers as well as enlisted men in the Royal Navy, whereas tattoos among French and Italian officers were less common. While serving in the Royal Navy, Princes George and Albert Victor acquired tattoos in Japan in 1881. American naval officers were also tattooed, some by Japanese tattoo artists, who had a reputation for finer work than ship's tattooers.
In the late 19th century, tattooing among sailors began to shift from a pastime on ships to professional shops in port cities, including in sailortown districts. In the early 1870s, Martin Hildebrandt, who had learned tattooing from a fellow sailor in the U.S. Navy, opened one of the first tattoo parlors in the United States. In 1884, Danish tattoo artist Hans J. Hansen opened the first tattoo shop in Copenhagen's Nyhavn waterfront district for sailors seeking tattoos. The development of electric tattoo machines in the 1890s enabled faster and more precise tattooing. To fulfill increased demand for tattoos, artists began to buy and sell sets of pre-drawn designs (flash), especially simple designs with black outlines and limited colors, to enable quick work.
20th century
Early 20th century
In records from 1900–1908, among the more than 3,500 sailors who passed through the USS Independence, 23% of first-time enlistees in the United States Navy were already tattooed, and an estimated 60% of "old timers" (sailors who had served more than ten years) had at least one tattoo. The common images were, in order of popularity: coats of arms, flags, anchors, eagles and birds, stars, female figures, ships, clasped hands, daggers, crosses, bracelets, and hearts. Comparative records show that sailors acquired tattoos more frequently than Marines or soldiers. In 1908, anthropologist A. T. Sinclair, who examined "many hundreds" of sailors, reported that 90% of American man-of-war men and deep-water sailors were tattooed, along with slightly smaller majorities of merchant marines and sailors on coastal trading vessels, compared with only 10% of New England fishermen. Sinclair reported that 90% of "Scandinavian (Sweden, Norway, and Denmark) deep-water sailors" were tattooed, whereas "other Scandinavians never use the practice."
Some sailors and service members became professional tattoo artists. Amund Dietzel learned to tattoo as a sailor on Norwegian merchant ships in about 1905–1906. Dietzel opened a tattoo shop in the United States in 1913 or 1914 and became an influential tattoo artist who worked on many sailors and soldiers. England had prominent tattoo artists in the early 1900s, including George Burchett, Sutherland Macdonald, and Tom Riley, who had served in the Royal Navy or British Army. In Germany, Christian Warlich, who said he had gone to sea as a young man, started tattooing in the port city of Hamburg in about 1919.
By 1906, the U.S. Navy discouraged certain tattoos among recruits: "Indecent or obscene tattooed designs are causes of rejection, but the applicant should be given an opportunity to alter the design." During World War I, to avoid being disqualified from service, sailors sometimes had a tattoo artist "dress" their tattoos of nude women. By the early 1920s, the Navy discouraged tattoos in general. Between the late 1910s and early 1930s, some tattoo artists complained that newer sailors were getting fewer tattoos, possibly due to being less superstitious than old sailors or considering patriotic tattoos old-fashioned. The Great Depression also reduced demand for tattoos among sailors. In 1936, the Mariners' Museum and Park in Norfolk, Virginia, acquired materials from tattoo artist August "Cap" Coleman with the intent to preserve a maritime art that seemed to be dying out.
King Frederik IX of Denmark acquired several tattoos during his service in the Royal Danish Navy, including dragons during travels in Asia around 1930.
World War II
A study of Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1943 found that 65% of customers visiting the city's tattoo shops were non-commissioned Navy personnel, 25% were enlisted Army personnel, and the remaining 10% were defense workers. All of the shops used electrical tattooing machines. Sailors continued to use tattoos as permanent identification: according to the study, Social Security number or service number tattoos were available for $1.50 ().
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, members of the Royal Canadian Navy and Canadian Merchant Navy frequented tattoo shops, where the traditional designs of "A Sailor's Grave" (a sinking ship) and "Death before Dishonour" (a skull pierced by a knife) were popular, along with patriotic images and pigs ("a pig on the knee means safety at sea").
Growth in popularity among non-sailors