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Matt Lodder on Tattoos as Art History

Art historian and author Matt Lodder joins Ben Yeoh to explain why tattoo history is not a niche subject, but a way into art history, class, colonialism, gender, fashion, technology, archives, and the stories societies choose to preserve or forget.

Matt is the author of Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos and Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art, and co-host of Beneath the Skin, a podcast that explores history through the lens of tattooing.

In this episode, Matt argues that tattoos have often been misunderstood because the historical record overrepresents people whose bodies were monitored: sailors, soldiers, prisoners and other surveilled groups. Meanwhile, tattooing among women, the middle classes, queer communities and “ordinary” people was often hidden under clothing, poorly documented, or preserved only in private archives.

The conversation moves from Matt’s childhood fascination with tattooing to the art-historical questions that animate his work. Rather than asking only whether tattoos are “art”, why people get tattooed, or what a tattoo “means”, Matt asks what tattoos reveal about style, taste, authorship, technology, reception and power.

They discuss myths around Captain Cook, the strange archival afterlives of tattooed skin, the invention of electric tattooing, Instagram’s acceleration of trends, AI-generated tattoo aesthetics, eye tattooing, and why museums still struggle to preserve an art form carried on living bodies.

It is a conversation about tattoos, but also about how culture gets remembered, flattened, misread and rediscovered.

Key takeaways

Tattoo history is a way of reading wider human history, because tattoos sit at the intersection of image, body, identity, fashion, technology and social judgement.
Many tattoo myths persist because archives preserve the bodies of people who were surveilled, while more private or ordinary tattooing often left fewer records.
Matt pushes against the narrow question of whether tattoos are “art”, arguing that art history is more useful when it asks about style, authorship, taste and reception.
Tattooing was not simply “discovered” by Europeans through Captain Cook. That story reflects later colonial myth-making more than historical reality.
Instagram has not changed the basic fact that people copy visual culture, but it has radically accelerated the life cycle of tattoo trends.
AI tattoo imagery is technically influential, but Matt is sceptical of its aesthetics and ethics, especially when it shortcuts artistic authorship.
Matt’s practical advice: ask tattooed people who did the work, look at healed portfolios, choose artists by style, and do not treat people’s bodies as public property.

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.

00:00 Meet Matt Lodder
00:36 Why tattoos tell history
03:27 Misunderstood tattoos
10:49 The art history lens
19:48 Performance art and the body
23:12 Writing Painted People
28:28 Unfinished tattoo mysteries
31:59 Myths, Captain Cook and cultural amnesia
39:28 Archives, access and private collections
42:02 Medical curiosities and preserved skin
42:31 Lost tattooed skin
43:56 The electric tattoo breakthrough
45:23 Museums misplacing history
46:32 How Instagram speeds tattoo trends
52:13 The internet and flattened styles
54:23 AI tattoo aesthetics
58:38 Overrated / underrated
01:00:50 Tattoos in museums
01:03:55 Eye tattooing risks
01:05:42 Current and future projects
01:07:13 Better questions to ask about tattoos
01:12:44 Closing and Ben’s tattoo confession

Transcript (lightly edited with AI so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey, everybody. I am super excited to be speaking to Matt Lauder. Matt is a historian of art. He's the author of Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos, and also the author of Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art. Both are brilliant books, which I found fascinating in how they treat tattoos as a story of being human.

He co-hosts his own podcast, Beneath The Skin, which looks at the history of everything through the lens of tattoos. Matt, welcome.

Matt: Hi, thanks for having me.

Ben: When and how did you first realize that tattoo history and tattoos in general was a way of telling the history of almost everything?

Matt: That's a good question.

I think when I, ... i- I've been fascinated with tattooing, tattooing itself and tattoos for a long time. And I didn't do history at school. I didn't do GCSE history or eight level history. I didn't ... I've got a PhD in art history now, but I didn't have any undergraduate or master's degree in art history.

So I had no ... It wasn't like I had a big wide ranging interest in history per se that then translated into a histori- into a historical interest. It really was the other way around. I got fascinated with tattoos from a very young age, and wanted to figure out as much as I can about them. And then I found my way through a kind of fairly circuitous, although it makes sense in hindsight the route to doing a PhD in art history.

And I think what you realize when you start understanding what art history is exactly that, right? We're not just art historians, not just interested in pretty pictures from the past. It's different from art criticism in that way. We're not just interested in whether a painting or a sculpture is good or bad.

But we're interested in what we would call, the indexicality of a work of art, right? So the basic kind of practice of art history is to figure out what works of art tell us about people and places in the past. And I realized, without really, cynically sitting down to, to do it this way, my, my questions about tattoos and where they came from or what they told us about tattoo people were also then really, interesting ways into thinking about human stories and cultural historical stories from a wide range of the human past, right?

If you can ... the way I used to explain it, if you can tell something about the past by looking at paintings in museums and churches and country houses, that must be also and perhaps particularly true for the images that people carry on their bodies. And yeah, when I sat down to write my first book and I was talking with the publisher and the agent about what kind of thing would work telling a story that wasn't just about the history of tattooing, but was about what tattooing could tell us about people and places in the past was a way into it.

But I came here really initially from a very ... literally childlike. I was literally a child who thought that tattoos were cool, and like 40 years later, here we are.

Ben: And they're still cool.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. Or people could tell me they're not, which is also part of the interesting, trajectory of tattoo history, whether

Where ... People ask me often. I speak to journalists and people ask me if tattoos are cool and I said, look if I could tell you answer that question, I wouldn't be a historian. I'd be a presentist, a- and I certainly wouldn't be a middle-aged man. You don't ask middle-aged men what's cool.

Ben: Yeah. I guess that's the problem is that some Facebook and social media isn't cool because now your dad is on it. And if your mom and dad are on it, how c- how can that, by definition, be cool? Exactly. I'm interested in how you came to it, partly because I have the impression that tattoos are still misunderstood.

I'd be interested if you think that they are misunderstood. And if they are, why in your mind are they so persistently misunderstood? And I don't know whether you'd hint at some of the biggest misunderstandings that you think you come across.

Matt: Yeah. It's, again it's mis- it was misunderstandings really that dr- that drove me here.

I've told this truth before, but I'll tell it to your listeners too. When I was a kid I got told ... I, basically, I was born in 1980. I was growing up in the early 1980s and seeing basically WWF- WLF wrestlers like The Undertaker, with cool tattoos and rock bands like Guns and Roses with cool tattoos.

And started as many young kids still do today to start scribbling on my arms with Byro and Felt Penn, and explaining it slightly to my mom and dad what called tattoos I wanted to get when I was older. And my grandparents sat me down and told me two stories, both intended to, to put me off, right?

One was the story of my grandfather, who was a Dutchman, submariner in the Dutch Navy in the then Dutch East Indies in World War II, and he told me a story that he was drunk on his rum ration somewhere in Jakarta in the early 1940s as they ... And he woke up just as they were about to tattoo a fly on the end of his nose.

So he told me and he woke up just in time and escaped the ignominy of having a facial tattoo, which is even more hilarious. It would be even more holistic if you knew my grandfather. He was a very austere, very stern, sensible kind of guy. And so that, in a way, is a quite familiar story.

I think that the drunken sailor and the regretful, youthful mistake i- is a fairly familiar story. My grandmother, though, told me another story about her mother, so she was born in England, but grew up in Australia. Her mother was the, grew up in Kent, the daughter of a tenant farmer in the early part of the t- early part of the 20th century, late part of the 19th century.

And she'd said that her mother, so my great-grandmother had a tattoo, which came about because one day her brother came home one day with a tattoo machine and said, "Hey, sis, can I tattoo you? " And she said, "Will it come off?" And he said, "Yes." So she apparently had her initials tattooed on her wrist and obviously hated it and regretted it.

And again, in a way, it's this story of a kind of youthful regret. But as I got older and jumped in those puddles, so to speak, you tell a kid not to do something and they'll get obsessed with it, as at least I did. I, as a bookish lad, I went looking for books about tattoo history and the late, the 90s in particular was what I now know as an academic of this period, we call the culporeal turn in the humanities, lots of real interest in the body in the 90s, lots of gender theory and racial theory and that sort of interest tallied into interest in tattooing as well.

And so when I got to university and I was starting to get tattooed and pierced and body modified as well I was just getting all the books I could find from the library at the university I was at and then on interlibrary loan about tattooing. And they all hinted at least in some senses towards that drunken sailor story of my grandfather, but didn't

The story of, like, where my great uncle got a tattoo machine from as a tenant farmer's child in Edwardian Kent I was like, "Where's that story?" And then moreover, as I was getting more and more tattooed and hanging around with tattooed people, the kind of only tattoos, t- only criminals and tailors get tattoos kind of thing I was reading was making less and less sense.

And I think w- to properly answer your question, I think the misconceptions have come from really a lack of visibility of the kind of stories of my great-grandmothers. I now know that, for example, tattoo machines were sold in Edwardian London in essentially department stores.

Whether or not that was the kind of machine that my great uncle had, I don't know, but, th- those catalogs, for example, were not in any museums I looked for, or libraries. The vernacular history in general, let alone tattooing, is not very well preserved and tattooing, of quote unquote regular people, is just not recorded anywhere.

It's not, you have to look very hard for it, at least. But what you do find if you're an academic who's interested in tattoo history, and this has been going on really since the middle of the 19th century when tattoos became a kind of important part of various branches of anthropology and criminology and sociology research.

If you're looking for tattoos in libraries and museums, what you find is tattoos on surveilled populations, criminals, because their bodies get recorded because if you run away, they wanna be able to check that they've got the right person and on sailors for similar reasons. So I think a huge part really, and we're talking, I'm talking about with, Western tattoo history a huge part of the misconception is just that most of it has not been visible.

Literally, it's been under clothing a- as well as being subcultural, and it hasn't been recorded in a way that was available to academics of prior generations. I think the other thing as well, to complete that thought is that tattooing is something that I think if you ha- if you are tattooed, or even if you understand the desire to be tattooed it's not that weird.

There is something ... I hesitate to use the words inherent, but it will do. There's something inherent about that desire to get tattooed if you have it or even if you don't, I think you can understand it. But for someone who doesn't want or have that desire to be tattooed, it looks painful.

So, it looks like why would you get something permanent on your body when you're gonna be, it's gonna be out of fashion in whatever time, and it's gonna make your life more difficult, it's gonna interfere with your job prospects. The questions that non-tattooed people ask tattooed people, does it hurt?

What will your mom think of it and what will you do when you're older? I think they are saying psychological insights as well into the kind of misconceptions about this practice. 'Cause as I talked about in both books- there's the wrong question to ask.

Why do you wanna get tattooed is the wrong question, at least for me.

Ben: Yeah. Reflecting on that, it feels a little bit like, I think people will probably understand if you say, why do people wanna dance? You dance from young, you have this impulse, probably quite a hard thing to put into words, but people, people- Yeah.

would get. And I'm interested that you come at an art history lens because like you say, there's being anthropologists, sociologists, blah, blah, you've got a high art, low art, what gets documented, what are the untold stories element to it? And I'm interested in looking at it as a cultural form, this art history form.

Yeah. What do you see or the kind of ... To me, it seems like a broader lens that perhaps anthropologists or sociologists have missed or this whole telling of the story, which seems it ... There's a sort of irony that I feel that it is art on your body or too on your body. Yeah. And yet some of it seems to be hidden and untold.

Yeah. Whereas it seems to be, I guess it, tends to be la- last for the life of the person, although we have mummified and other things, so it doesn't go into museums at some art, but you have more ephemeral art practices- Yeah. ... which do go into the art conscious, from my practice, performance for sure- Yeah.

but a lot of other ones. So it seems to me really intriguing this and how it got picked up by the sociologists and things maybe first and through potentially a narrow lens and where we've ended up.

Matt: Yeah. I think ... So this is really at the core of ... I think this is really where I got to. It wasn't really the starting point of my PhD, but it's where I got to.

So my PhD, which I started in 2005 on the back of a master's degree that touched on some of the same topics a couple years earlier I wanted to write really in this kind of, l- in the light of this late '90s work on embodiment, I wanted to think about what it meant to be an artwork in the world, right?

Like what was the kind of ... This is a kind of very pretentious, philosophical thought, really, commensurate with scholars in their 20s and what academia was like in the late '90s anyway. I wanted to understand, I think, the phenomenology and ontology of an artwork, right?

Because tattooing's an art practice body art, we all know what that is. So I thought then I'd be interested to know what it means to be what's the ontology or phenomenology really of being an artwork in the world? And it turns out that the first premise of that question, which is tattooing an art form anyway, was actually way more complicated

In some senses, not complicated at all, I think, but it was certainly understudied. And so I'm still working on what was gonna be really the first chapter of my PhD that I started 20 years ago, right? The ... What I think is really important about art history as a methodological set here is that we don't care what is and isn't art, right?

Whether something is or isn't art is for us a kinda contingent question, right? So we will take it as a given in a historical moment or, the classic kind of formulation of if an artist says it's art. That's really the position that art history as a discipline has taken since the least 1970s, probably e- even a little bit earlier.

For philosophers of art, aestheticians, the question of is something art or not is interesting, but art historians, we don't really care. In fact, I have interesting conversations with my philosophy colleagues at Essex who keep telling my students that there is a definition of art, and I have to tell them off telling them that.

So art historians can skip over the thing that I think a lot of other disciplines get hung up on. Anthropology is really important here. Anthropologists and I've written an academic paper about this particularly the work of a guy called Alfred Gail although there are predecessors as well to him in the '90s wrote basically a kind of series of books about what has n- now become known as visual anthropology, right?

The anthropology of making things, making images and objects. And Gail basically based that initial thinking because he was largely anthropologist of the Pacific on tattooing, right? He wanted to think about how tattooing could be art in an anthropological sense. And in a well-meaning way, he wanted to avoid this idea that he understood art Western art history to have, which was a kind of chauvinism, right?

Which it can be art if it's good, if it's beautiful, if it's technically proficient, if it's normative, none of which is particularly true. I don't think of contemporary art history as a method but probably is true of art history as a cultural thing. So Girl and others then came up with this idea that to, to get away with that the way that anthropologists should, would think about tattooing and other forms of, i- indigenous art making, for example, would be to think about, not about their style, not about their beauty really, but to think about their function.

And this was and Gail himself says "I'm methodologically Philistine, Philistine, I'm a methodological Philistine." He said, "I'm anti-art necessarily," right? And what he meant by that is he didn't wanna get bogged down into questions of beauty, which he understood as hierarchical, and he wanted to think about form.

So that's why it functions. The point of making a shield with a lion's head on it, this is an example that he gives, is because it's scary for the, for example, the scary for your enemies. So there's a kind of functional thing here. And so anthropologists who've been thinking about tattooing after Girl, and it's also implicit in work before him too, we're asking basically, why do you get tattooed right?

Which for a nice story, and I, as I just said, I think it's the wrong question. We don't ask. In fact, it's completely uninteresting to tell a night story and why people paint, or if we do ask that question, it's only the beginning of our inquiry. There are functional art objects in the Western Historical Canon, things like altar pieces and stuff.

But, like, why people do it is only the first kind of layer. And then we get into things like, which I think are much more interesting, which are questions of style and taste and reception. And weirdly although it seems really obvious to me that tattooing is a, can be understood in the same way as a painting.

Crucially, I don't ever wanna make the claim that tattooing is art for reasons I've already explained. What that was- wasn't present anywhere, surprisingly enough to me when I started up my research. And it feels a bit like an open goal to me, because most tattoo people understand it.

It's natural, right? But the implications of that question, so things like who is the author of a tattoo, for example, is it me as the person who has it on their body? Is it the person who puts it on my body, the tattoo artist? Is it some combination of us? These are things that art history has tools for and theoretical arguments about.

We talk about things like patronage and architecture. For example, there is a lot of interesting literature on collaborative making, but anthropology and functionalism can't do that, don't even think about that. And I think I have been asking the wrong questions. And there are similar examples for sociology as well.

The sociology of tattooing comes out of criminology, really, which was designed in a moment of scientific racism to try and diagnose how primitive you are, right? So I think ironically, art history, particularly art history as it developed in the back end of the 20th century, was just a method set that was increasingly interesting, let, uninterested in the things that had bogged down and I think impeded other disciplinary approaches to the same set of questions.

But it seems, it's ... I talk to tattooists sometimes and have my whole career who go, "Yeah, obviously." Obviously it's an art form or obviously we can think about style, taste, authorship, fashion, technique, the relationship between technology, machines and inks and the kind of tattoos people get.

All of those things for people who are doing it, it's almost a bit obvious to them.

Ben: Yeah.

Matt: And it's very rarely that I say stuff and publish stuff that hasn't in some form been articulated by a tartarist amongst themselves in the last century.

Ben: That's fascinating. That brings up so many things, but the simple answer is yes but then you go on and then also that it might be completely the wrong question.

I recall speaking to someone who essentially studies photography as well through this lens. I don't think they quite called themselves a historian of photography, but maybe ... And they also answered, there's a question, from philosophers is photography art and they were completely- Yeah.

uninterested in whether it was art or not art or how you might ...

Matt: It's interesting as a historical question. So as a contingent question, when galleries start treating photography as art and photographs as artists, is it a historically interesting question because it tells us something about the cultural moment, but whether the object itself is or isn't art is exactly, as you say, a weird question.

Anthropologists also, some of my students take a module with my colleagues. We have a really great set of anthropologists and I'm not shitting on them really although it sounds often like I am. I don't mean to. I've got some of my best friends who are visual anthropologists.

But some of my students take visual anthropology classes which focus on photography in visual anthropology and that, and they're quite astonished actually the methodological divergence between those two approaches because those first photographs will be te- treated as functional or as documentary or even if they're not, even if they have a kind of aesthetic dimension, that aesthetic is itself taken as functional, which is just not how art historians think about images,

Ben: Yeah. I guess it's the same on, I guess what we call cave art it's got, it's, completely, obviously we have, we'll never, ever know what the people who made those things were thinking, and it's just impossible. Yeah. So exactly. You gotta start from a complete-

Matt: Yeah. I cited an art historian in, in, in this paper that I wrote about who pointed out that art historians still, or maybe now especially, don't have a theory of intention.

We have to import theory. We, if we need them for our questions we're asking, we have to import them from i- from psychology and art and anthropology. But since the 1960s and 70s, art historians haven't had a theory of intention, which for me is interesting because, so many things about tattooing pa- have boiled down to what does that mean or why would you do that?

So why would you choose a tattoo in the first place and it, why did you choose that tattoo? And I think for that really makes sense, it really cuts off a lot of potential areas of inquiry which an historical approach enables, you know?

Ben: Yeah, that feels very narrow. I'm really fascinated essentially by what word would I use?

The interdependencies, the interdependency of the tattooist, your choice, how you present, and that's for a lot of creative human endeavors, interdependencies in music, when we make things together- Absolutely. ... collaboratively, particularly in performance art where you have a script and then it's embodied and then it's ephemeral, all of these types of things.

Matt: Performance art for me, performance art for me was a real clique moment as I was doing my ... I did a master's, so I did an undergraduate degree in languages. I've been really interested in ... I did a theater studies MA. So I was really interested in my teenage years in Brexton and in fact my A- level theater teacher hated theater theory, and I ended up teaching my class Brett when I was 17.

But I went and did a degree in French and German, and in my final year, had a module in European cinema about remakes. And all, in that, we started reading again some of the things that I'd been interested in, including Brecht actually in, in, in my theater studies degree. And then I started realizing

I did a master's degree in the body at Reading, interdisciplinary master's degree in the body. And on that, we had lessons, lectures from theater studies and performance studies people. And all of a sudden, someone said to me like someone like Lee Bowery the fashion, club kid and performance artist who I'd seen on a genes ad, in the late 80s and thought was incredibly cool.

Or like all these people that I was seeing, like Ron Athey who were getting in trouble for doing kind of very bloodily performance art. Someone said, That's called art, right? All of these bands that I liked were doing very bodily, shocking performances, the fact that there was a kind of lens to understand that stuff as art, as I said, my parents didn't take me to art galleries.

I didn't really have a frame for knowing what art was. And when someone said, "That stuff that you like that is performative and performance is art in some senses," I was like, "Oh, that really clicks for me. " But I didn't know it was art, when I saw Franco B bleeding, until he fainted and when I saw I don't know, Gina Parney, all of those very extreme, if you like, or very kind of intense performances from the late '90s that just crept into my subculture as a kid who was like reading heavy metal magazines.

When s- when it turned out to me that was art, I was like oh, okay. Now I can start making the connections." And performance art for me was really, a real cornerstone of how I think about all of this stuff.

Ben: I remember seeing Franco B, I think a performance cutting and bleeding on a white paper roll in the room

being so viscerally impacted and thinking if I have this visual impact from all of these kinds of things, I can see why these things we're putting in the realm of art." I'm interested that through the lens of history, I guess a typical person thinks of history chronologically within time, but when I read Painted People and your choice of that, you went through individual tattoos, I think 21 of them, rather than a straight chronological history.

Yeah. And alluding to that, I'm interested why you chose to do it that way via, versus time, essentially a linear time thing, although I guess historians would argue that. And also then how did you choose, and maybe in that choosing and choice and investigation, did the, was there anything which you discovered or your mind was changed a lot about what you thought about it?

So it's a little bit why through individuals rather than say a strict timeline and how did you go about ... thinking and choosing that?

Matt: So I'm a big fan of chronology in general, partly because we talked about misconceptions earlier. One of the misconceptions that really bugs, for example, the history of Western tattooing is this idea that it quote unquote only recently became, not just for sailors.

I have a whole lecture that I give on this and the re- more, most recent book was a bit structured about this too. This idea that tattooing is over now and is far too fashionable and it was better and it was underground, and it goes back to the 1880s. There's examples from every single decade in the la- from the late 19th century to the present, saying that tattooing only recently, became fashionable, which I think is hilarious when you're finding examples from the the, from 1905 saying that, ta- tattooing used to be confined to seeming only, so when I did my exhibition, I did a big exhibition called British Tattoo Revealed, that doing that chronologically is really important because it helped people understand, I think, when we started out telling, what early modern antiquarian historians were saying about tattooing in the 16th century it was able to instantly give people an idea that everything they thought they knew about the recency of tattooing as a presence on British bodies wa- was misconce- misconceived.

So where tattooing can, where chronology can serve a rhetorical purpose, I think it's really useful. The painted people is laid out chronologically, but I also really wanted to A, tell as much of a geographically diverse story as I could, although I because I'm not an anthropologist, something else I'm really, I try and do that, that other people haven't done in the past is I try and not go, get out over my skis.

So painting people I talk about, for example, Inuit tattooing and a couple of chapters. I talk about tattooing in Fiji, I talk about tattooing in ancient Siberia. But I do so as much as possible from a lens of, like, how the people from outside those cultures encountered them, wrote about them, en- en- engaged with them, I can't write and wouldn't wanna write an anthropological account of what those practices really quote unquote mean, because to do that requires, much deep expertise and I don't.

And this is, this comes down to this sort of cl- one of the cliches that I repeat a lot, which is, tattooing as a medium, not a phenomenon. I wanna, so I wanna try and ... So the painting of people approaching having an individual sort of character tattoo for each chapter was a way of de- anthropologizing the practice in a way.

It was also a way of trying to break up this idea that again, is a problem, I think, in the historograph- historiography of tattooing in the West, which is that people think increasingly less now. I think the message has been getting out there after me and some of my predecessors were shouting about it for a long time.

People thought, like Gail himself did, that tattooing was discovered in the Pacific and there was no tattooing in Europe prior to the late 18th century. And so deanthropologizing those stories and having individuals from dif- disparate parts of the world from a broader period of time, I hope, try

I wanna sever the connection between that and the idea that Western people stole tattooing from indigenous people, because that itself is a kind of racist lie. And in fact, there's a chapter right in the middle of Painted People about Mecock, this Inuit woman who was brought to England basically commissioned with the departure of Cook's fleet to Tahiti for the first time.

And her portrait with her facial tattoos was hanging on the wall of the Royal Academy in London the day that Captain Cook and Joseph Banks first set foot in Tahiti in 1769, which I think is a remark- it was a remarkable piece of like final nail in the coffin of that, what my colleague and friend Anna Friedman called The Cook Me.

So the approach was just a way of yeah, de- anthropologizing, ta- tattooing in a way selecting the stories there are annoyingly actually, and we only, I, only 20 chapters, because the 21st was supposed to be the prologue, which was the story of my great-grandma that I've already told you.

But the editor basically thought that it was taking too long to get to the first chapter, which was fair enough. So we incorporated her story into the book, and by that point it was too late to change the title. So there actually are only 20 chapters although I, the 21st is my great-grandma and I got that into the introduction.

But the way we chose them really, I wanted to tell cool stories. I wanted to tell stories that represented as much kind of global tattoo history as I reasonably could with my skills and what I thought was interesting. There were some things we had to get in, all good popular history books need a bit of ancient Rome and ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and ancient China, these are great.

But they were also opportunities to tell, I think big stories of the kind we were alluding to about colonialism, about myth making, about cultural normativity and each of those individual stories were ways into specific problems. There's a, there, there's chapters which also deal with things that I wanted to myth bust.

There's a chapter, for example, about two criminal, two Victorian s- sex working women who were presumed to be part of this gang, the 40 thieves, and it turned out that, the jailer in that case basically pointed out that not every single person who has a tattoo is in the same gang, a mistake that the FBI is still making 200 years later.

So there were a few stories I wanted to tell in there, stories that needed to be told and stories that kind of worked in the context of a trade book. In terms of things that I learned there were two stories in the book that are unfinished and they're ones that I've written errata for on my website and are still unfinished.

And with them, when we did the paperback there wasn't enough room to fully include the bigger stories and both of them kept developing. So this is a long answer, but we'll just go quickly into both of them. One is the story of this young girl, which I think is also a really good example of what the book's trying to do.

The story of a young girl called Madeline Altman, who was a middle class girl from Brooklyn in the early 20th century, 1906. She ran away from home and they found her a few days later cheering gum and covered in tattoos, basically. And she's linked to tattoo history because one of the people that tattooed her was the guy who invented the electric tattoo machine, a guy called Samuel O'Reilly.

But as far as recorded history goes, she was in the papers for about three days, four days. She, and she just seems cool. Like she's 15 and sassy and I always wonder what happened to her. And what happened to her becomes a story of that chapter and it's, the book becomes a story about children's homes and how young women are treated in America in the early part of the 20th century.

And when I wrote the book, I wasn't able to find her. She disappeared into the historical record. And then in subsequent years some more genealogical documents were uploaded to various databases that allowed me to finish her story. And long, long story short, after a sad life marrying into a wealthy family in Texas, she ended up running away with a cowboy actor who's one of the most famous cowboys in drugstore cowboys in Hollywood history.

So that was nice. Her her ha- she got a happy ending anyway. And then the other story, which is a story that is also interesting and ongoing, was the story of whether Picasso was a tattoo artist. And there were stories essentially in the Icelandic press in the 1950s. So that chapter becomes a story about basically prop- propaganda, communist propaganda in the 1950s.

I was researching the Argentinian beef trade, for example. There were a couple of things that I missed in that story and a couple of things that came to light later on. And anyway, it turns out the story was that he was, as a joke, Picasso tattooed the wife of an Argentinian beef magnate with a hammer and sickle in 1953 and this became a diplomatic incident.

None of that is true at all. So then the question became like, where did it come from? I think it was pretty likely a CIA plot. And then a paper was published by a guy in Sweden who pointed out that the author of the original article in the Swiss, in the Swedish papers was basically a kind of undercover Swedish intelligence operative.

So my kind of instinct played out there, but it's still quite murky. But then subsequently, I have found through some private archives and some really digital stuff that there is evidence of Picasso discussing tattooing with George Brack in about 1917. The, those two stories, which both of those chapters almost were written as I'm going through these very weird and strange archive trails and both of those trails continue to roll out,

Ben: That's amazing.

It just really reflects your other tagline, the history of everything or certainly the history of humanity. And it seems all entangled. And I was, it was really interesting that a lot of the ideas we're grappling with now are ref- are reflected with that, or been grappling with, since forever.

And I'm interested in some of those myths. How important do you think it is that we have these origin stories and they're apocryphal or wrong and where they are. You mentioned a couple sort of the Captain Cook one. Yeah. The class one, through the British lens of class, but you can see it through money or call it aristocrats or not, which seems to also reflect this low art, high art kind of thinking around and what respectable women to tourists seem to be- Yeah.

like women in art and also women in novels, although perhaps a little bit less at least as writers, mostly forgotten or not. And that seems almost amazing as well. And then obviously the Western traditions versus all non-Western. Do you think that just reflects how human culture is developed or do you think there's something specific around this where you think about it through class and women and what's been forgotten?

Is it just unsurprising to you that we have this history which just reflects through tattoos?

Matt: Yeah. It becomes, I think it becomes essentially a historiographical question as much as a historical one, right? So the Cook example is really interesting. So as I said, you will still find books and even scholarly books written. I said fewer now, because I think we've got better at getting the story out, but certainly up until very recently, books that said Captain Cook discovered tattooing in the Pacific.

Now, Captain Cook didn't even believe that. That story s- so the Cook Voyages, between 1769 and 1776, that story appears, that said not long after the Voyages, the first examples I think are in the early 1800s. So then the question becomes, why does that story happen, right? Why is it that people believe that Captain Cook discovered tattooing and there was noticing on Europeans?

And of course the ar- I pause that I say, of course, I posit the answer to that is essentially, scientific racism, that it becomes the story of the colonial era of the 19th century that non-Western people, the people of the, global majority who were colonizing are different to us in a quite profound way.

And tattooing is one way to articulate that. So the narrative of history is a way of cultural storytelling. And that's really just, and I don't mean that in any kind of conspiratorial way, really. It can be, but it's just a way that, it's just the way that history and historians work and the way that knowledge works.

The Anisia question for me was so interesting and why the story of Meacock was one of my favorites to write in Painted People because I was like, how did people forget that there was, a tattooed Inuit portrait on the wall of the British the role of the Royal Academy in 1769.

And prior to that, not even hidden away in ... there is some tattoo history that we're discovering that is very buried and quite obscure back into the 16th century and stuff at the moment. But every major history of the British Isles, for example, talks about tattooing amongst the ancient Britains.

Now, it turns out, ironically, it probably, it actually probably wasn't true but certainly antiquarian Britons believed that there was tattooing happening in the British Isles, and these are in all of the classic histories of British tattooing. It's in all of the major Roman histories and of Britain, it's in Tacitus.

So how did we miss that? What, why did people think that? The same is true of, and again, to pick my great-grandmother's example, right? It was really amazing to me to learn that you could buy tattoo machines in essentially Edwardian Debenhams, a place called Gamages, and we've since found out they were also available elsewhere.

Not, not hidden away. One of, one of the catalogs is basically tattooing, comma, telephones, et cetera. It was a fairly normal part of the offering of this particular store and some others like it in the Edwardian period. But the story of the 20th century and World War II, et cetera, a- and the intellectual histories doesn't really allow for that to be an understandable, perceptible truth.

The same is true across all kinds of historical thinking. You see all this outrage in tabloids about storytelling of people of color in British history, for example, and it gets slandered as rewriting history, as if that's a bad thing. But what all rewriting history is doing is basically going, "Let's go back and actually check.

Let's go and see if we've missed anything. Let's see if those of our prior generation look..." And of course, we do this ourselves, we're looking, we're always looking through the evidence we have through the lens of our own politics and experience to some degree. Yeah, I think for me, tattooing's really interesting because so much of its history has been told by i- in particular ways and also much of it's been invisible.

So much tattooing has been under clothing, particularly marginalized tattooing. Gay, I write a lot and do a lot of research on queer and gay tattoo histories- so much of that would be hi- hidden away. And I never wanna kinda also say that and this was a problem in the newer book, really.

I, I, in a way, the new book's a bit re- it feels a bit regressive historically because it is, someone did write this in a review, but it is a story of largely white men, right? But unfortunately, I have to say, that is what happened. The tattooist who was in ... There were loads of tattooists who were women, people of color doing stuff, tattooing, but the people who were influential, the people who were popular, people who were known about, the people who actually made an impact on the history per se, were white men.

Some of them gay, not all of them straight white men but were white men. And it's a fair criticism, but as a c- a friend of mine once said, he's a historian of piercing, he's or he's where are all the kind of trans, diasporic piercers from the 1950s?

And it's they didn't exist or they did exist, but they didn't exist in a way that is relevant to the overall big story of the tattoo and piercing industry story. So we found these individual people who were doing cool stuff o- on their own time, and there were some interesting archival lens problems that we got into.

L- lesbian history's much worse told than gay male history, for example, partly b- largely because of social reasons.

Ben: That's really fascinating. That, that whole idea that what, what gets told, what gets hidden, all of the reasons, all of the reasons behind that, I think that's really, that's really fascinating about what remains not.

And on the whole, we forget the amnesia point the more I speak to people, it's interesting how we seem to do this across all domains. So we seem to have forgotten science ideas. Yeah. Like even just because Captain Cook's been mentioned a couple of times, but the whole lemon scurvy thing, it's an idea- Yeah.

we seem to rediscover two or three times within a period of 50 to 100 years because we forget it. And even scientific method ideas, like we come to this idea of today, this controlled trial, which is a very core science idea, you, we could have discovered it ages ago and it seems to have popped up and then disappeared again.

We humans seem to be very good at forgetting stuff.

Matt: Yeah, for getting stuff and getting stuff wrong, and again, I'm, we're all guilty of this just necessarily as human beings. And part of the structure of academic thinking and scientific thinking is meant to correct for that or meant to kinda, mitigate those things as much as possible, things like peer review and things like just, academic rigor in general footnotes and citing your sources and stuff, like that's meant to as much as possible work against that.

But also a big part of it for me has been the institutional history that I alluded to earlier on as well. Historians of tattooing in the past have those who've been academics have either come to tattooing really because they were bored with what else they were doing and they thought tattooing would be a fun hobby and they'd ring someone up and basically, "Hey, you're weird.

Can I come and interview you, whatever?" And they get told to, to go away. But also this institutional history of collecting. Tattoos are not easy to collect because of their ephemeral nature. But more than that, just the ephemeral history of tattooing, the things that I study a lot, machines, drawings, photographs self-published, small run magazines, letters between tattoos, they're not the kind of things that have any institutional history anywhere in the world, right?

Some are collected peripherally, but the big collections of tattoo history are all in private hands which comes with its own challenges, but with its own joys. And it's, I think it took a generation ... So there was a ... I came, as I said, of age as an academic in this period in the late '90s and the 2000s, which coincided with a general interest in the body, which I'm very fortunate to have.

Lots of my colleagues who did PhDs in tattooing are now not working in academia, they're doing other things. But nevertheless, I think we all benefited from having been tattooed, from knowing tattooed people, from understanding it from the inside to some degree but even, it's taken me as I've been doing this, however you wanna count it, for somewhere between 25 and 30 years.

And it's taken me that long in a way to really start to get credibility and access to material that, let alone the things that people don't know are out there, that people know and just don't wanna share with people. And there still, I'm sure there's still things out there like that too. And that's important.

Huge amounts of my work is premised on, in a way stuff that the tattoo industry in, in part already knew, but it's based on documents, images, stories that just weren't accessible to conventional academic methods.

Ben: I think that's really important. I remember viewing the photographs of Nan Goldin and part of her work is the fact that she's essentially documenting her community and coming through that and you have that.

And it's this really interesting question of, who gets to collect, who gets to decide, who documents, and in the past, like you say, l- the lesbian community wasn't documenting anything for l- lots of reasons- Yeah. ... or were being purposely marginalized, and then even coming through it.

Matt: Let me give you another example from, that's in both books, but again, I found out more about this in the time since. During COVID I was, putting together Painting People and I came across this report in the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons and it talked about in 1891, this group of, group of surgeons, as they do, get together, and they basically meet up once a, a few times a year or whatever, and they'd bring along a cool thing.

They'd cut off a patient recently, essentially, show and tell, right? And there's a story in there of this guy called Jay Biggs, who brought along I'm not, I'm quite from memory here, but some, something like a most interesting specimen of a tattooed Irishman, right? I have been doing this a long time. As I said, my colleague, Gemma, is a historian of specifically preserved tattooed human remains. I said, "Have you heard of this, Gemma?"

No, I looked at the University of Edinburgh's human remains record. It wasn't there. And, no one had seen or heard of this since. So I presumed it must be lost, but I wrote to the librarian and said "I know you haven't got this skin anymore, but do you have any records of where it might have gone or who it might have come from in the first place?"

And a few days later, he was like, "Yeah, I think I've seen that. I think it's in the storm." Anyway, there were two freestanding dry preserved skin specimens, one of basically a whole front of a man, a young man, and then one another of two rib panels. The back piece must still be out there somewhere or always lost.

And it's just been sitting in this library since it was, or archive, since it was donated to them in 1891, and no one had looked at it or recorded it or seen it since. And I went to look for records of ... So now I know a bit about big things and stuff. I went to look for more records. And basically, the records are just had a meeting, people bought stuff.

It wasn't even officially interesting to them to write much down about it which I find amazing. And it turns out, and here's the kicker, something that isn't in the book because I found out subsequently, that, those skin, that skin is basically the first tattoos ever done with electricity.

That man was the brother of Sammy Lo'Riley, the first electric tattoo artist in the world, and I only spotted that because someone on Reddit had posted a picture of this guy, John O'Riley, that I'd seen before, but had upped the up the contrast of the image, and I was looking for something else, and I was Googling it, getting something else.

I think I was looking ... I was looking for a story about another, a different tattoo Irishman, actually. So I was Googling how to tattoo an Irishman, this image came up, and I've seen the picture, but I hadn't seen it with the contrast made up. And I was like, instantly you only see the top part of his chest, but I was like, "Oh my God, that's the skin."

And now all the story makes sense, but how this guy died, we know that he was still performing in America about three or four months before his skin showed up in Scotland. Like, how his skin's in Scotland, why it's there, how, who, who dissected him, what none of that information we've yet discovered.

I'm sure some of it may be out there, some of it isn't. But basically, unless some Victorian or Edwardian person wrote it down and for whatever reason, those records have been preserved for the present day, we'll never really know what happened there. And we're building up these pieces of where his back is and if it's still out there yeah, it's, but that's the kind of thing we deal with all the time.

Ben: Yeah. That's amazing. But at least you know why it's, why it probably was important, why they kept it and may- maybe of the time.

Matt: I don't think they even knew. I just think, I just think- It's interesting they just didn't, so many museums, you hear, I've had a few of these in my career where it's like, "Oh, we found this in our museum.

Where does it come from? No idea." This is professional museums, let alone private collections and family collections,

Ben: maybe it's no, no surprise then if the professional memory keepers are doing this that we're losing so much.

Matt: And a friend of mine, a friend of mine who's a historian of like protest and political protest he went, he was doing a book and he went looking for images of some posters and they were from a, I think they were from a Native American group in the '70s or something.

And he found the person who owned them as far as he knew and they said, "Oh, we donated them to this particular museum." And so he wrote to the museum, they said, "No, we haven't got them. No, that's not ... " He said, "Look, can I just come and look for them in your stores?" And he basically went there knowing that they were there, the muse- and found them in a box labeled uninteresting catalog last.

Ben: Oh, crazy.

Matt: This is systematic.

Ben: I would- maybe we'll mention museums in a little bit, and I know we're pressing on in time. I'd be interested in teasing today a little bit and your thoughts. I guess two things come up on social media or particularly Instagram because I guess that's visual social media, but in, in general.

And I guess another one will be what you think AI might do. And I guess there may be a tiny bit interrelated as well, but I was interested in how you think Instagram has changed or not how we pr- how we present this. And I, you know- Yeah. ... I've only flicked onto it, but there's a whole seemingly another subculture of where Instagram meets tattoos or maybe it's just an.

Matt: Yeah. No, 100%. Yeah. I think so, I, again, came of age at the, this is, I think also part of the reason I have a career. I came of age, at a particular moment in the 90s when the internet was nascent and I was a big early adopter of online culture. I got a modem for my 15th birthday in 1995 and the first thing I did was seek out information about tattooing and piercing on a web, on a, on bulletin boards, on usernet groups and on websites that didn't have any pictures on them, or at least I couldn't afford to see them if they were pictures because they were, it was like 60P a minute.

I remember my mom on my 14 four board mode. But even that early, even that early moment of the late '90s, early thousands tattooing culture, being online, started to change how people thought about it. But more, more so perhaps with piercing and body mod stuff. So we're talking about things like subdermal implants, tongue splitting that, things like that basically

And I've talked to a really good friend of mine who ran one of the most important very hardcore archives of subcultural body modification practice on the internet in the early 2000s. And he's now, as a much older and wiser man, a bit worried about this question, about what it was that making visible this stuff to people who would perhaps not have encountered it on their own did, for example, so I have a split tongue.

Ben: Oh, wow. Yeah. For those that are seeing the video, that's quite amazing.

Matt: Tongue splitting is the only body modification that we have no anthropological antecedent for until 1997.

Ben: Really?

Matt: Yeah. So there were rumors about it and it being possible from the mid '90s onwards but no one had seen it or proved it was possible until 1997.

And then, some, basically a guy in Italy sent an anonymous photograph of his tongue split to this website, in the middle of 1997. And then instantly, about three or four weeks later, four more people had copied it. And then, I got my insight six years after that, partly because I didn't understand it, and I think the only way to understand it would be to do it.

But would I have independently come to the idea of cutting my tongue in half? Probably not, right? And then you come to the question of the ethics of that proof for another podcast. But this kind of thing, there have been people doing stuff, their body's tattooing and everything else because they had some kind of innate uncommunicated desire.

They didn't see it in magazines. Obviously, it wasn't something they knew was po- possible, but they were trying it out in the privacy of their own homes. And those people are the, men and women are the pioneers of our scenes, if you like. But there is a question about, it's also relevant for lots of other conversations, things like anorexia, body dysmorphia, fashion in general.

Would, if you didn't see it, would you desire it? And if you didn't, is that a bad thing? I think what Instagram's done, really, all it's done is ... and other people differ on this, and this is a sociological question as much as not a historical one. But I think as an art- art historian, I would say what Instagram's done is speed up the cycle.

And I think that's true of all kinds of other forms of cultural production as well, of music and of clothing and of, everything else.

Matt: Before, I think tattooing was the kind of thing where and again, this is something that I think is quite obvious from historical record, but wasn't really articulated.

People get tattoos that are linked to the visual culture of their moment. So civilian tattooing and, 300 AD, those, the tattooed images they have match the images we find in their metal work and on their leather work. The same is true in ancient Peruvian mummies. The designs we found on preserved mummies in Peru matched the kind of images that we have on stoneware, for example.

And people in the 19th century after the opening of Japan are getting Japanese style tattoos or tattoos of their favorite paintings. And so I think what Instagram does is just accelerate that. Trends that used to maybe persist for a decade or most of a decade and now over in a couple of years, but it's still just like people getting tattoos that they see that are trendy and cool and that feels, some tattooers feel that is a cheapening of tattooing, but I think in some forms, it is just a version of what's always happened, more or less.

Ben: I can see that with a sort of less controversial example, back to my very first one on dancing, like a lot of people have an impulse to dance. You could say everyone, maybe not everyone has an impulse for body art but some do. And then we've gone into these TikTok and Instagram dances.

So- Yeah. ... you do them.

Matt: Great.

Ben: Some people systemize them and, but they live and die very fast.

Matt: Yeah.

Ben: But presumably we've all wanted to dance. Some of us wanna put it out there and then we copy we've copied dances all through the real- ... that they used to last for longer and now a TikTok dance might last for a month or two or not even.

So I can really see that happening. Now, whether it's true across perhaps smaller impulses, it does seem like we've had an impulse to body mod for a while, maybe not everyone and surfacing that this …

Matt: Things become, even if they're not normative in mainstream society, as they as body modifications and tattoos are in certain places and have been at a certain place in certain times in history they will become normative in subculture, but subculture's much more complicated in the age of the internet.

One of the things that happens in the, basically, and one of the reasons why you'll notice both my books slightly cowardly end around the turn of the millennium and I need to start grappling with that really is because after the turn of millennium, the story is much more difficult to tell because ev- I'm interested in influence in a way and stylistic evolution.

And in, in the era of post-modernity in the 21st century, everything's flat and you can't trace ... There's a really popular style of tattooing now that is called cyber sigilism. People call it spiky tribal. And I can't find any ... Someone may know this, but I haven't found anyone and I've looked, I can't find who started that, that style… It's everywhere now.

It's very trendy amongst young people. People like me hate it. I don't like it, but that's fine.That's good. If I liked it, it would be bad, as I said- Couldn't be cool. Yeah. Exactly. It's the stuff that's very cool or was, probably was until about five minutes ago. But there must have been, there must have been even if it's not one person, there must have been a kind of subculture somewhere.

I think maybe in Russia is my best guess where that came from, but it doesn't, there's not one person that I can identify or happen to yet to identify who is the originator of that style. And there isn't even, as far as I can tell, a mythology for that other styles in Western tattoo history like black and gray, for example, there is a mythology about who invented it.

So this is just what's happening with the internet. It's too fast, it's too diffused, it's too flat and there's less kind of depth. And I don't mean that critically, just as a fact in, where these styles come from. The other thing as well is about removability. And I think Gen Z have become increasingly comfortable with the idea that tattoos are removable, which is more true than it was when I was younger, but certainly not true.

And there's been a lot of interesting kinds of brouhaha recently about ephemeral tattooing and tattoo removal and how much it costs and stuff. So I think that there's something cultural about that's also lends itself to Instagram. I think Gen Z has begun to think about tattooing as less permanent, which I think is a problem.

And one of the reasons why tattooing, one of the reasons people get asked why, what will you think of when you're older is a weird question for a tattooed person because we, I think most of us are quite, especially heavily tattooed people are very comfortable with the idea of being an old tattoo person.

On AI, and this is it fits into a lot of controversy rightly so about AI use by tattooists which I don't think was quite your question. I think the A- the AI, and we did a whole episode of the podcast about this. What's interesting is that there is a kind of aesthetic of AI now and you will see there are some really incredible tattoos clearly done with AI.

There's lot of bad tattoos done with AI by tattoo artists. And I'm really no fan of it. I'm a very, quite military anti, actually. But one of the interesting things, for example, is that if you look at photorealistic tattooing ... So photorealistic tattooing, again, has its detractors. It's incredibly interesting to me as a technical feat because I've just got all traditional, which is just black lines and color in it.

I don't really understand how it even works. But photo realistic tattooing, obviously, up until very recently was limited by what the customer could bring a photo of, particularly if the artist was not particularly skilled in collaging or drawing photo realistically without direct reference, right?

What you see now is really big, very good, well-executed tattoos that have clearly been composed using AI because you can ask it to put photorealistic details into a, that you can give it into a composition that will work. Now, there's lots of really terrible AI tattoos and I don't even like the ones I'm talking about, but technically they're great tattoos.

And but, and of course, we live in an era of the AI generation, so of course, some people like that, and so some of their tattoos are gonna reflect that aesthetic. That seems like quite an obvious question, in a way, as a historian but not something that, for example, the anthropological account has given much weight to.

Ben: That seems fair. On your earlier point about not knowing where things come from and just observing that's perhaps to do with having a flat culture, I have a pet theory of change or pet theory, limited evidence, but some is that some things are almost becoming an emergent property of how people and things get together, because you have this with memes.

Yeah. So we don't really know how memes come about. Sometimes you have got a trace story, but- Yeah. ... often they seem three or four relatively weak stories- Yeah. ... which somehow morphed together and we've taken that as the narrative of how they come or even TikTok dancers. So that's another form of meme.

And sometimes we have an origin story, but sometimes when I look at them, it feels very weak and people don't really agree, but it seems to be an emergent property of these things, Yeah. ... come together.

Matt: I get I've had the, again, this has been something for a long time, and I think interestingly, one of the mistakes that popular culture and even some bits of academic culture have made about tattooing, which is to overdetermine that kind of thing, what does a certain image mean?

You'll see this a lot on TikTok of people saying "if you've got a spiderweb tattoo, it means you killed someone in prison- ... or if you've got a swallow, you cross the Atlantic or whatever." Someone that I know once who had a teardrop tattooed on his face was stopped at immigration to the United States on his way to go to, this was years and years ago, way before the Trump era, on a way to go to Disneyland on his honeymoon and the border guard basically said "Why haven't you declared your, incarceration history?"

Yeah. I know that having the tattoo, tattoo of a teardrop means you killed someone in prison or whatever it might be. And he was like, "No, I'm just a guy with a tattoo from England who thinks that it looks cool." And this is, again, the story of that chapter in Painted People. But yeah, that overdetermination of thinking about tattooing as non-arbitrary, what we might call in art history iconological, is a real mistake.

I also once got, this time how long ago it was because it was on Tumblr. I once got a Tumblr DM a long time ago from somebody that was, like, obsessed with One Direction, the boy band, and was asking me if Liam's tattoos meant he was really in love with Harry, and I had to go doesn't really work like that, not straightforwardly, at least.

But that's, but that, as you said, that's a mistake that people make, I think, are overdetermining origin or making, understanding this, again, what we might call an academic thinking on this topic extreme intentional theory, like this idea that you only communicate what the author intends.

And I don't, this just can't be true can't be true.

Ben: Wrong question.

Matt: Yeah.

Ben: Maybe coming to the last two or three questions, I thought I'd do a very short section and maybe, because I actually got a sense of where it would be of overrated, underrated. So I'll name something- ... And then you can tell me whether you think it's overrated, underrated.

But we have touched on most of these, but just to clarify but overrated, underrated, then AI. So I'm assuming this is overrated for you- Oh, over, yeah. ... terms of AI as a- way overrated AI as a tool- Yeah. ... is that in fact- Yeah, way

Matt: overrated. ...

Ben: even a little bit sus- not suspicious, but that yeah the output of it, particularly in the world with a two is, is definitely overrated.

Matt: Yeah, dangerous. Yeah. Again, that's, I listen to my podcast I've said about that, because I could learn about that for an hour. Overrated.

Ben: And then and then laser removal. So I got the sense that this was overrated as well, or rather the concept of that, I guess the core idea of it too is that it does last through time.

So m- maybe if you get one with the fact that you're going to remove it later, then that's maybe something else. I don't know. So laser removal, overrated, underrated.

Matt: So I think it's ... So I don't know. I'm somewhere in the middle of that. I think actually s- some people do ascribe a kind of moral weight to that phenomenon that you're talking about.

The idea that actually, getting a tattoo removed is somehow a bad thing. I think that the increasing improvements of lasers is actually a pretty good thing. If you've got a tattoo that's bad, if you've got a tattoo that you don't want anymore, if you have a tattoo, if you've just run out, as a friend of mine did run out of space, because she, her whole body was tattooed, like head to toe, and she just ran out of room wanting to get tattooed more.

So she got basically a whole bodysuit removed and is going over it with new stuff. She happens to know the tech- the se- laser technician, so I don't think she's paying full price for those sessions and the tattooers as well. But I think the technology's, it's really interesting. I think there's gonna, I think there's real interesting health implications and I think, I, there are some people, and I probably would include myself in this to some degree, actually who think that if tattoos became instantly or easily in cheaply removal, it would slightly detract from what makes them interesting and important in the first place.

I think I probably would count myself to some degree in that camp.

Ben: Okay. Interesting. So yeah, a bit more pots and takes than that. And then tattoos in museums, overrated or underrated?

Matt: Underrated I'm doing a big exhibition next year in collaboration with the National Museum of Wales about female tattoo artist Jesse Knight who's an incredible woman.

And I've worked very hard over the last five or six years. I did ... I collaborated on an exhibition at the Museum of London in 2017. I did a big touring exhibition between 2017 and 2020 2021, and then I'm doing this show next year at the National Museum of Wales. And I've worked very hard to get collections into museums and archives.

So Jesse's collection, I helped ... I convinced the Arts Council that it was a nationally important ar- art historical collection and was saved for the nation by the National Museum of Wales. And I'm the trustee of an archive called the Bishops Gate Institute which now has two major archives of queer tattoo history that I helped them acquire.

And I think it's important that, especially as actually loads of the big collectors who have big intact contingent collection, con- contiguous collections are starting to die off or disperse their collections, that we find ways to keep tattooing ephemeral history in institutional collections because once they're dispersed to private collections they disappear.

Private collectors are amazing. The reason that, that the history of Western Tattooing has been preserved as well as it has done, but it's very fr- we're in a very fragile moment where most of the big collectors are, coming, getting on in, in age, some have already died, and there's very diff- very difficult in the state of how museums are funded, how museums work to understand what's gonna happen to those collections- in the next decade or so.

Ben: important to archive, as we said, in, in collect- collect, yeah.

Matt: Yeah, but I, interestingly, I think partly because of my work, but just in general, due to the kind of cultural changes that's been happening in the museum sector around the world, there is an increasing interest in, history be- beyond the kind of standard things that museums have tended to do, and tattooing has felt like something, that, that can attract, and it does work to attract new audiences.

I think it has to be done carefully and properly. But yeah, I think the challenges of actually preserving tattooed skin is a real issue, obviously and morally and ethically and legally increasingly complicated even those human remains that are tattooed that are in museums already. But it's an inter- it's an interesting time and an interesting problem and I think we're trying to find ways to get around these issues.

When I did my exhibition in Cornwall, we worked with a friend and went to Alice Snape who ran a tattoo magazine at the time to basically get tattooers in around the country. We did a hundred tattooers in Britain to tattoo rubber hands-

Ben: Wow. ...

Matt: to create an archival stylistic index, three-dimensional stylistic record of the kind of tattoos that were happening in Britain in 2017 that will now, that are now permanently part of the collection of the National Museum of Cornwall that hopefully will be there for some tattoo historian in a in a century or so to come to go back and have a look at those, three-dimensional objects.

So yeah, it's interesting. And of course now with digital preservation and things, there are ways of preserving this stuff in a way that hasn't been before.

Ben: Last one in this one, just because I listened to your recent podcast on this and was amazed would be eye tattoos, do you think-

Matt: Oh, yeah.

Ben: overrated, underrated.

Matt: Oh, over, overrated entirely, terrible idea. Even people I know that were early pioneers think that they were a terrible idea not really tattooing in a conventional sense. Yeah. Yeah, we did the whole episode about, about t- again, TikTok led trends for Irish tattooing and then subcultural te- tech trends for corneal tattooing, both of which strike me as just a terrible idea.

I've got bad enough eyes anyway- Yeah. ... I'm not gonna risk doing

Ben: Anything. I have to see, yeah, like Franco B- visceral, but it didn't make me queasy. Hearing about eye teas, I don't know whether something about the eye did actually make me feel a bit queasy-

Matt: All people are funny about eyes, aren't they?

Yeah. Yeah. I think what's interesting about that, again, the eye tattooing was something that there was a small group of people in the early 2000s, the same, literally in some cases, the same people that were doing the tongue splitting stuff, who really had a kind of very gonzo attitude that they were at the frontier of some really interesting corporeal hacking, which I find very interesting again, a topic for another day and very brave.

And those guys and gals were, like, they knew what they were doing in some senses, even though their risk reward ratios were calibrated- Yeah. ... in a particular way that I think is good. And there's a difference importantly in a lot of this between brave and reckless, they were brave, not reckless.

I think anyone roaring their eyes or towing anyone else's eyes these days is pretty reckless. And we talked about in the episode, some really egregious examples of that where people have blinded themselves and blinded others. It just doesn't seem like a good idea. And even people I know that have done it, as I said most, nearly all of them would agree that it's not a good idea.

Ben: Gotta know where you draw the line. Okay, last couple of questions. What current and future projects, anything you'd like to highlight? Obviously, you do your lecturing, you still curate, organize exhibitions, not sure if you're working on other book projects or anything, but anything you'd like to highlight for listeners?

Matt: Yeah, there's a couple of interesting things. I'm still trying to nail down the next big solo publication. I've got a couple of things in the fire. I wanna write more about this tattoo and Mr. Sebastian, who I talk about in Painted People and Tattoos, was involved in a really interesting court case called RV Brown in the late 80s, early 90s about gay men and sadomasochism.

So I wanna write a book about that. I'm doing a law degree in the service of trying to write more about that. I'm doing this exhibition with the Nationation of Wales as a consultant opening next year. I'm assisting a p- a a, on a big kind of coffee table anthology of global tattoo practices.

I'm not writing, but I'm assisting on. And with some colleagues in Japan, we're trying to do a kind of almost version of Painted People for Ja- Japan. So we're trying to do a kind of history of Japan told through the history of tattooing books, but that's in discussions at the moment and it requires some thought.

So I've always got more stuff on the go than I've got real time to do, but I'm always trying to keep up with things. There's, and there's lots of interesting smaller things happening as well. But those are the big ones. This summer's gonna be mainly working on the Jesse Knight exhibition that's gonna open in Cardiff in March 2027.

Ben: That sounds amazing. And the last question is do you have any advice for listeners? Thinking about this, perhaps the question I would ask is if you're interested in somebody's tattoos, what should you ask them? Or I guess you could also, we could also do people who are interested in having one.

Are there any reflections- ... that you might have? 'Cause there seem to be a lot of obvious questions that we probably shouldn't ask I think we mentioned a couple d- maybe don't ask-

Matt: Does it hurt?

Ben: Yeah. Does it hurt? What is it gonna look like in 20 years and like all of those obvious ones, but I'd be interested in, what's the question you would like to be asked.

And then maybe one of the people listening to this at night thinking "Oh, I have, I do have this impulse." Yeah. Where should they lead themselves with that impulse?

Matt: I think, so when I started out, and one, again, one of the reasons why I became so obsessed with tattooing anyway is that it was quite hard to find good tattoos to and by that technically and competently execute as much as anything else.

Like when I was in my late teens, the tattoos that I was seeing in tattoo magazines that I was importing from the United States didn't look anything like the tattoos that my mates were getting underage at the local toy shop in Essex. That's less true now. A quick kind of Instagram search will, if you're going to a reputable studio, we'll rev- they're really incredibly good, technically good tattoos in ev- in any, in every town in the country.

So if you want something small or a single tattoo you're really spoiled for choice now in a way that I wasn't before. I think a lot of people imagined, and this is partly, I think also one of the problems with AI, people think you have to bring the thing you want, like the image you want tattooed with you.

Most tattooers are, especially increasingly now themselves artists and are able to draw you something which will work to your brief. So I think the thing is to look for tattooers whose style you like and then just go and meet with them, go and have a, go and have a conversation with them and talk to them about the kind of thing you want, l- look at their portfolios online, look at look for heeled work, because I think a lot of people, particularly if you're interested in very small tattooing or very kind of complex tatting, a lot of the stuff on, online is photo edited these days.

So the best tattoo is all post healed work. So ask to see that. But really find a tattoo who you're comfortable with, whose work you, you're interested in and who who you wanna spend some time with because obviously, every second of every tattoo you get, you're gonna have to be sitting there with them so it's important to get towed by people you get on with.

In terms of asking questions about other people's tattoos, I think those, in a way, these questions are the same. When I was younger, I got groped, even as a kind of man I got groped by people in public. They'd come up and they'd pull my sleeves up or they'd start tugging at my collar.

That happens less now, at least to me. I'm sure there are people who can report this happening to them. But I think if you wanna talk to someone about their tattoos, I think they, I think just say, "Hey, your sales are really interesting or cool, the, I think the best question to ask is who did them," right?

Because that gets you into the kind of questions that I'm talking about, which is where are they based, what kind of styles do they do? What kind of person are they? How long ago did you get it so you can see how things heal, for example, I've got tattoos on my hands, you see online, they say… don't get tattoos in your hands because they'll fade.

These are, like, 20 years old and they're still more or less the same color they were made.

Ben: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah, those faded a bit. But I think that's the thing. And for me, this is also, to circle right back to the start, one of the key insights of my work, which is actually to think about the tattoo artist, because there are whole books, and certainly socio- sociology and criminology less anthropology, really but certainly

Oh, not a bit, but cer- certainly sociology of tattooing was r- and psychology of tattooing was really premised on the person with the tattoo, and I was like, "What about the tattoo artist, who have their portfolios, even back then, had their portfolios in printed form, now have Instagrams." They don't care about what the person's tattoo is, the person on whom the tattoo is, their story or their motivation, they just wanna present it as their interesting artwork.

And so I think thinking about the tattoo artists, their skill, their history, their interests, their style their art, their training artistically all of those things are gonna be interesting questions, or at least, if not questions, kind of facts about them which will help you as a customer find the tote you want, the thing we say, the thing we say in the two inches, go bold go big or go home, bold will hold. So if you want a little tiny tattoo, that's fine, but I'd always say get a big cool tattoo. Yeah.

Ben: Be cool. Oh, that sounds great. So first advice, don't grope anyone. Yeah, don't, yeah. That's

Matt: Just, that's just blanket advice.

Oh, yeah. Throw it here first, people.

Ben: Don't grope anyone.

Matt: Don't grab at people's clothes.

Ben: But the other one that's interesting is to ask about the artist.

Matt: The artist. Yeah. Ask who did it.

Ben: Yeah. Great.

Matt: Yeah. And some people ... O- o- for small tattoos, people won't necessarily even remember because it was just a little Stevenier tattoo or something that took 50, 50 minutes or something.

And that's fine too. But certainly for bigger work, certainly for more elaborate work, I think the right question is always the first question's always who did that. Then you can ask, does it hurt in that part of the body, for example? And the answer is always yes, right? Of course, it hurts.

Some places are more painful than others. But the first question should always be, I think, who did it. And that's what, when I go to conventions, when I talk to tattooed people that I meet, that's always the first question I wanna know is who did that.

Ben: Great. That's amazing.

With that, Matt I will once again say you've written Painted People, get the book, and also the Untold History of a modern art. And with that, Matt, thank you very much.

Matt: Thanks so much, Benjamin. Before we finish, have you got any tattoos?

Ben: No, I don't.

Matt: A Blank.

Ben: Yeah, I am blank and no body mods either. I have, yeah, I have been fascinated about it, but I haven't I've like a small impulse, but there's other lots and bits of fear which I've not met I've I haven't crossed the Rubicon yet, but-

Matt: Yeah, the first one's the hardest one. The first one's the hardest one, so that's good.

Ben: My art teacher always used to say that the first stroke is always the deepest.

Matt: Great. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Great questions. It's really wonderful.

Ben: Thank you.

Matt Lodder on Tattoos as Art History

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