Sailor tattoos are traditions of tattooing among sailors and tattoos inspired by these traditions. These practices date back to at least the 16th century among European sailors, and since colonial times among American sailors. People participating in these traditions have included military service members in national navies, fishermen, and civilian mariners on merchant ships. In particular, there are records of significant numbers of tattoos on U.S. Navy sailors in the American Revolution, Civil War, 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 tattooing 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.
In the United States, these sailors turned tattooists trained a generation of professional tattoo artists, who went on to develop the American traditional ("old school") tattoo style by combining popular motifs with styles and techniques learned from Japanese tattoo artists. "Sailor tattoos" can refer to this style of tattoo, which was popularized for a broader audience in the 1950sâÂÂ1960s. Then, after a period of fading interest in this style, tattoo artists 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.
To what extent tattooing among European sailors traces back to an indigenous European tattooing tradition, and to what extent it is a product of cultural exchange during the Age of Discovery, is unknown. 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.
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." 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.
English and American sailors 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. Maritime historian Ira Dye writes 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 per se, 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.
Following the American Revolution (1765âÂÂ1783), 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, a Royal Navy ship, a lieutenant wrote letters about the mutineers to help capture them, and he described tattoos on 21 out of 25 of them. They had European-American tattoos, such as hearts, stars, dates, initials, and a triskelion, as well as Tahitian tattoos.
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."
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 as well, such as engraving tobacco tins, scrimshaw, and coins.
Sailors had skill 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 1843âÂÂ1844, recounts:
A letter from a sailor serving aboard the USS Monitor during the American Civil War describes his "old salt" shipmates as significantly tattooed:
Personnel records from the USS Adams from 1884 to 1889 show that 17.5% of its crew had tattoos. Rates of tattooing varied between the occupational groups aboard the ship, with 28.9% of men who actually sailed the ship having tattoos, compared with only 4% of men who provided specialized services, such as apothecaries and carpenters.
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 V 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.
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, possibly mentored by a ship's carpenter and tattoo artist named Johan Fredrik Knudsen. 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.
By 1914, the U.S. Navy had started discouraging risqué tattoos, so, to avoid being disqualified from service, sailors sometimes had a tattoo artist "dress" their tattoos of nude women. 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.
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 for identification: according to the study, Social Security number or service number tattoos were available for $1.50.
By the 1920s–1930s, artists including Lew Alberts, Cap Coleman, and Milton Zeis developed and sold large quantities of American traditional flash to tattoo artists serving military service members and the general public, including many maritime-inspired motifs inked in black lines with a limited color palette. This style was further popularized in subsequent decades through the work of prolific tattoo artists such as Norman Collins (known as Sailor Jerry) in Honolulu and Lyle Tuttle in San Francisco. In particular, Collins reworked 1920s–1930s designs with influences from Japanese tattoo artists, creating stylized images that appealed to a wider audience in the 1950s–1960s. The diffusion of sailor tattoos to a wider audience was also happening in Canada during those decades: tattoo artists working in port cities and near Navy bases reported that, in the 1950s–1960s, while they mostly served sailors, they also had other customers who wanted sailor-style tattoos. At the same time, a Time article in 1953 said:<blockquote>Since World War I, tattooing has steadily declined. It is too conservative, for one thing, holding to such dull, outmoded motifs as Mickey Mouse, foul anchors, and bathing belles of yesteryear. Ebensten laments: "No atom bomb explodes on any lusty chest."</blockquote>
By the early 1990s, interest in sailor tattoos had waned among sailors and non-sailors alike. In 1995, artists at Bert Grimm's tattoo studio in Long Beach, California, near the Long Beach Naval Shipyard that was scheduled to close in 1997, spoke about a decline in customers: fewer sailors seemed interested in getting traditional tattoos that marked them as Navy "lifers", and the Navy was discouraging tattoos.
Despite a general decline in interest, the "old school" style had remained popular among tattoo artists, and in the 1990s and 2000s, artists such as Don Ed Hardy promoted a revival. Hardy had been trained by a tattoo artist, Samuel Steward, who learned from Amund Dietzel and had some of Dietzel's flash in his shop. In 1995, Hardy published a book that supported renewed interest in older designs, Flash from the Past: Classic American Tattoo Designs 1890–1965. In 1999, Hardy, Steven Grasse, and Michael Malone started Sailor Jerry Ltd. to use Collins' flash designs on products including Sailor Jerry Rum. Hardy's own tattoo designs blended American and Japanese traditional styles. Hardy started licensing his tattoo-inspired art for a line of clothing in the early 2000s (see ), and subsequently many other products have been sold under his brand. This themed merchandise contributed to the popularity of American traditional tattoos among the general public.
Tattoos remain popular with U.S. sea service members and other seafarers, such as crew on ocean research vessels. In 2016, the U.S. Navy liberalized its tattoo policies, allowing sailors to have tattoos below the knee and on the forearms and hands, as well as tattoos up to one inch by one inch on the neck, including behind the ear. Sailors with visible tattoos became eligible for recruiting duty and training recruits at boot camp. The U.S. Coast Guard changed its policies in 2016 and 2019 to allow arm and hand tattoos, respectively, with the aim of supporting recruitment efforts. In 2020, the U.S. Navy considered opening tattoo parlors on bases, as part of Navy Exchange shops and services.
Sailors in the Royal Australian Navy have incorporated symbolic tattoos as part of their nautical traditions. In 2017, the Royal New Zealand Navy gave its first approval to an active sailor to receive a traditional MÃÂori tÃÂ moko. Since then, more people have received moko while in Navy service.
Norwegian tattoo artist and historian Tor Ola Svennevig published a book in 2013, Norske sjømannstatoveringer (Norwegian Sailors' Tattoos), with photos and stories about the "last generation of Norwegian sailors".
In the 2010s, "retro" sailor-style tattoos continued to be popular as part of the American Traditional style. One tattoo artist in London said, "People don't want the tattoos their dad had, they want the tattoos their granddad had", referring to crests and traditional sailor motifs from the 1940s–1950s. Regarding the practice of modern people getting new tattoos of old flash designs, many of which are derived from sailor motifs, art historian Matt Lodder wrote:<blockquote>To tattoo a tall ship on a sailor in 1920 was a reasonable, and perhaps inevitable undertaking; to tattoo such a ship on a millennial suburbanite is, like Menard's Quixote, 'almost infinitely richer'; though identical in form it is buoyed by several centuries of accumulated cultural resonance, to which the very act of repetition only adds.</blockquote>
Protection papers for American seafarers between 1796 and 1818 provide an important source of information about older tattoo designs. Along with the United States coat of arms, Masonic lodge symbols, hearts, and religious symbols, nautical images were popular: anchors, mermaids, fish, whales, ships, the mariner's compass, and the carpenter's axe and adze. Anchors on the backs of the hands were especially common. Sailors also frequently wore the names and initials of themselves and their loved ones.
Crucifixes and other Christian religious motifs have been among the most common tattoos for sea service members and fishermen for centuries, including with the intent of ensuring a Christian burial if drowned.
Claims that particular designs reflect sailors' superstitions, including the belief that certain symbols were lucky talismans, have circulated since at least the 1930s. It is not clear how old some of these traditions are, as the associated designs do not show up in the surviving protection papers from 1796âÂÂ1818. One claim is that sailors believed that a nautical star or compass rose would help them find their way back to port; Sailor Jerry popularized a version of the star in red and black.
Some stories about superstitions have historic documentation. In a superstition dating back to at least the late 19th century, a pig and a chicken, usually tattooed on each foot (pig on the left, chicken on the right), were wards against drowning in a shipwreck. "Hold Fast" across the knuckles was a charm to help deckhands and boatswain's mates keep a firm grip on the rigging, described as a "great favorite of old timers" in 1921. In 1850, Herman Melville recorded that crosses on the feet were meant to prevent shark attacks if a sailor went overboard.
Sailors have chosen to get tattoos as records of experiences, such as travels, achievements, and battles won and lost. An anchor has often been a sailor's first tattoo. A boatswain's mate may wear crossed anchors, while a gunner's mate may wear crossed cannons, reflecting their insignia. A deckhand may get a rope tattooed around the wrist, and a member of a whaling or fishing fleet may get a harpoon. A fully-rigged clipper ship has been a popular design for a long time, and for some sailors it represented traversal of Cape Horn, an important trade route that was especially dangerous. A ship could also indicate a skilled .
Tattoo artist Doc Webb said in 1985 that sailors could get a bluebird tattoo after traveling , and a second for traveling , on either side of the chest. A 1974 book described a similar tradition with a swallow or bluebird at the base of each thumb. Webb also said that a sailor may get a tattoo after a line-crossing ceremony, such as a shellback or King Neptune tattoo to reflect crossing the equator, or a golden dragon to mark crossing the International Date Line (Domain of the Golden Dragon). Sailors have come up with more variations, such as a golden shellback turtle to represent having crossed the equator and international date line at the same time.
Some sailors who served in the Pacific acquired tattoos as souvenirs from ports of call, such as in Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines. Influenced by their travels, some chose images of dragons and "Suzie Wong" girls. Tattoos of hula girls and palm trees were common among sailors who had sailed to or were stationed in Hawaii.
Creators of literature, comics, movies, and other stories have portrayed sailor characters with tattoos as one of the distinctive signs of their profession. This is part of a larger theme of sailors, also called Jack Tars, as a kind of stock character. Tattooed sailors were a "minor trope" of Victorian literature; in A Study in Scarlet (1887), Sherlock Holmes is able to identify a retired Marine on the basis of an anchor tattoo on the back of his hand. Norman Rockwell's painting "Sailor Dreaming of Girlfriend", on the cover of the January 1919 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, shows a sailor with an anchor tattoo on the back of his hand. The 2003 historical drama film ', set in 1805, portrayed an older crewman with "Hold Fast" knuckle tattoos.
The tattooed sailor has been used as a humorous figure. The cartoon character Popeye the Sailor Man, who first appeared in a comic strip in 1929, has prominent anchor tattoos on his forearms. Another Rockwell painting, for the cover of the Post in March 1944, shows a tattoo artist adding a woman's name to a sailor's shoulder below several crossed-out names, among many other tattoos. With typical fidelity, Rockwell borrowed a tattoo machine to use as a reference. In the 1954 film There's No Business Like Show Business, Ethel Merman and Mitzi Gaynor cross-dress in sailor outfits and sing "A Sailor's Not a Sailor ('Til a Sailor's Been Tattooed)" to each other.
Some representations of tattooed sailors are sexual fantasies. In Tom of Finland's illustrations in the 1960s, the tattooed young sailor represented a masculine, gay archetype of sexual availability. French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier, influenced by Popeye and Tom of Finland, has used the stereotyped gay sailor and sailor tattoos in his work involving camp and ambiguity in gender and sexuality. Gaultier has used images of eroticized tattooed sailors to advertise Le Male, a men's fragrance, since its launch in 1995. His fragrance advertisements portray sailors with "old style" tattoos as masculine objects of male desire, with some tattoos that suggest a comic exaggeration of masculinity, while other tattoos have an element of decoration and thereby femininity.
The Wellcome Collection in London has approximately 300 pieces of preserved tattooed skin from between about 1830 and 1929 in France. The collection has tattoos applied by and to French army and navy service members, including military and naval motifs.
Several maritime museums have hosted temporary exhibits about the history of sailor tattoos. In 2009, the Independence Seaport Museum in Pennsylvania curated "Skin and Bones: Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor" with material from the museum's collection as well as the Kinsey Institute and Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibit was also shown at Mystic Seaport in 2011 and included antique flash books, tattoo tools, photographs, and other artifacts. In 2013, the Vancouver Maritime Museum collaborated with a tattoo artist to present "Tattoos and Scrimshaw: The Art of the Sailor", which displayed historic materials and contemporary photographs of U.S. Navy service members. The South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan held an exhibit in 2017, "The Original Gus Wagner: The Maritime Roots of Modern Tattoo", with materials about merchant seaman and tattoo artist Gus Wagner (1872âÂÂ1941).
The U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command has curated related exhibits at U.S. Navy museums. In 2015, the Puget Sound Navy Museum showed "Skin Deep: The Nautical Roots of Tattoo Culture", with tattoo machines, needles, scrimshaw, stencils, and other materials, along with biographies of tattoo artists who worked in American ports. The National Museum of the American Sailor presented "Marked by the Sea: Tattoos in the U.S. Navy" in 2021, including a tattoo kit from 1899 and stories from service members and veterans.