Cindy Ray (real name Bev Robinson) was Australia’s first tattooed alternative pin up girl and became hugely popular after posing for hundreds of photos in the 1950s and 60s. The image is one of many lavish illustrations in the new and updated edition of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoos.
Most people think of tattoos as a modern phenomenon, but according to author Margot Mifflin, getting inked has been part of subversive subculture for centuries.
Mifflin traces the history of women and tattoos in Western society from the early 1800s to the present, charting the special significance tattooing has for women as a powerfully transgressive form of self-expression.
Olive Oatman is believed to be the first white woman in America to have had a tattoo. Abducted with her sister by native American Indians in 1851, she became a sensation when she was ransomed back years later, her chin adorned with tribal tattoos.
Such was her fame, that many of the female travelling circus attractions who started to appear in this period, earning a living showing off their own tattoos (and their naked flesh), pretended they too had been abducted and tattooed by Native Americans to add to their allure.
In the UK, the history of tattooed women is slightly different. Popularised by explorers returning home full of tales about the weird and wonderful tattooed people they saw on their travels, body art became the accessory of choice for upper class women in the 19th Century.
Even Queen Victoria is believed to have had one in the form of a Bengal tiger fighting with a python. Wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie also had a serpent tattoo, although hers was rebelliously visible and inked bracelet style around her wrist. Mifflin explains:
Upper class women were making a feminist gesture. They were taking control of their bodies when they had little power elsewhere.
Sadly, tattoos didn’t equal control for many Victorian women, some of whom were tattoed against their will and press-ganged into work as circus attractions.
But while tattoos remained popular during the 1920s, their popularity waned in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Left to languish in the fashion wilderness for nearly 40 years, the tattoo next staged a comeback in the 1970s, when they were claimed by the nascent feminist movement.
It was about the greater freedom of women to do what they wanted with their own body. In the 70s, tattoos took on a whole new dimension when issues of abortion rights and contraception and government regulation of women’s bodies called attention to the question of who’s controlling women and why.
Since then, tattoos have become ever more popular. Mifflin charts how the rise of body art mirrored that of cosmetic surgery in the body-conscious 80s, before becoming part of mainstream culture in the 1990s.
Although a huge celebrity trend, the book reveals that tattoos have also been adopted by breast cancer survivors, who use them to conceal the marks left by their mastectomies.
This chimes with Mifflin, who envisions a future where faded roses and barbed wire designs have become a thing of the past; replaced by tattoos that compliment the body rather than smother it. The back design above was created by one of the UK’s leading female tatooists Sara Hunjan.
The future of tattooing is about decorating the body and not hanging pictures on it. And abstract work has a better chance of standing the test of time.
Slideshow of images from the book.
