Matt Lodder

In 1881, a writer in the Saturday Review called tattooing ‘an art without a history’. ‘No-one’, it went on, ‘has made it the business of his life to study the development of tattooing.’ Until now. Painted People is a beguiling and intimate look at an untold history of humanity. The earliest tattoos yet identified belonged to Ötzi, the ‘iceman’, whose...

In 1881, a writer in the Saturday Review called tattooing ‘an art without a history’. ‘No-one’, it went on, ‘has made it the business of his life to study the development of tattooing.’ Until now. Painted People is a beguiling and intimate look at an untold history of humanity. The earliest tattoos yet identified belonged to Ötzi, the ‘iceman’, whose...

The true history of tattoo as both art and profession in the West There is a pervasive stereotype of tattoo culture as relating to an underworld of scoundrels, sailors, and ne'er-do-wells, yet it has existed in the West as a professionalised art practice for centuries. Drawing on extensive new research and unprecedented access to largely unpublished private archives of photographs,...