Customizing the Body (PDF file) - Print My Tattoo

16 Introduction
Soon the tattoo rage made its way across the Atlantic and began
to affect the rich and powerful in America. On December 12,
1897, readers of the New York Herald were asked:
Have you had your monogram inscribed on your arm? Is your
shoulder blade embellished with your crest? Do you wear your
coat-of-arms graven in India ink on the cuticle of your elbow?
No? Then, gracious madame and gentle sir, you cannot be au
courant with society's very latest fad (quoted in Parry, 1971
[19331: 103).
The first professional tattooist to practice in the United States
was Martin Hildebrand. He claimed to have "marked thousands of
soldiers and sailors" while travell1ng among both the Confederate
and Union forces during the Civil war. By the 1890s Hildebrand
had opened an atelier on Oak Street in New York and was continuing
to ply his trade. Other well-known American artists practicing
during this period in the Chatham Square area of New York were
Samuel F. O'Re1lly, "Professor" Charlie Wagner, Jack Hanley ("The
World Famous Artist"), and Lewis ("Lew-the-Jew") Alberts. For the
most part, the Bowery tattooists and their colleagues in other
East Coast cities lacked formal artistic training and were, at best,
only moderately talented. They devoted themselves to inscribing
crude, badge-like marks on largely working-class patrons who
populated the bars, pool halls, and barbershops located in rundown
urban areas. For a brief time in the 1890s the Japanese
master Hori Chyo was enticed by a $12,000 a year offer from a
New York millionaire to practice in America and two other Japanese
tattoo artists were brought to New York under the sponsorship
of Samuel O'Re1lly. These oriental tattooists were primarily
responsible for the introduction of dragons, serpents, and other
oriental designs into American folk tattoo imagery (Parry, 1971
(1933): 101; Fried and Fried, 1978: 162-166).
Samuel O'Re1lly's place in tattoo history was assured by the
major part he played in the development of the electric tattoo machine.
This technological innovation was significant because it increased
the rate at which tattooing diffused in the SOCiety.
Tattooing with the electric machine subjected the customer to less