Skin in the Game: Victorian Princes, Irezumi, and Body Art’s Western Upgrade

Although the skin of Neolithic Tyroleans and Stone Age Scotsmen was extravagantly inked, ancient Greeks and Romans abhorred body modification, and Christians and Jews alike pointed to Leviticus’s injunction against “cuttings in your flesh.” Some Holy Land pilgrims marked their devotion with stenciled markings, but few Europeans sported ink before sailors who crewed for Capt. Cook encountered and adapted the practice Polynesians called tatau.

Europeans’ perceptions of tattoos as the province of savages and sailors were upended when Queen Victoria’s son Bertie (later Edward VII) became an aficionado of skin art after a trip to the Holy Land. When his sons visited Japan, Bertie urged them to visit a master of irezumi – Japanese tattooing. A crossover practice inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, irezumi relied on the same tools and inks, but applied to a new medium: living skin. As a facet of japonisme, irezumi came to connote fashion-forward sophistication in Bertie’s circle.

Whereas sailors’ and pilgrims’ tattoos tended toward the simple and formulaic, and took cues from Western visual culture, irezumi – complex, multicolored, and often mythic – reflected a foreign aesthetic. Costly and rare, it was regarded as high art and inspired connoisseurship among a select few. Unlike other costly collectibles, irezumi was little displayed, and couldn’t be sold or gifted. If indelible, it was ultimately ephemeral; those who wanted their acquisitions to outlive them relied on another new medium, photography, to document ink they took to their graves.