TATTOOING

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 582, 7 February 1929, Page 18

TATTOOING

Old Craft Practised in This City

PICTURES OF PRICE

Days when the trade in Maori heads was a flourishing one and the shores of the Waitemata were its marts find just the suggestion of an echo in the city of today. The ancient art of tattooing is still carried on in Auckland.

It is no longer the slow and painful process of moko, ii; which the intricate designs were carved on the faces of chiefs with sharp-edged bone adzes and with no small inconvenience to the patient. In an upstairs room, the walls of which are covered with flamboyant pictures of dragons, scrolls, butterflies, girls, tigers, amatory tokens and an immense variety of other subjects, sits Mr. Joseph Hood, who practises the craft in Quay Street. DECORATED GIRLS

Sixteen years did Mr. Hood serve as ship’s cook in the mercantile marine, and tattooing fascinated him early in his career. The result is that his arms are blue and red and green with the pictures scratched into his skin by artists at Singapore, Colombo, London, Melbourne, Sydney-, and even Wellington. He picked up the craft and used to practice it on shipmates before he came ashore.

For three years he has been set up in his business in Auckland, and among the most numerous of his customers have been the men of the New Zealand Naval Division, many of whom still follow the tradition of the tars. Merchant seamen, also, and not a few country youths go into his room to have their skins decorated. It seems as though the craze, alleged by the newspapers to have firmly established itself in London a year or two ago of limb tattooing for girls, had a brief popularity here. About 20 or 30 Auckland girls have applied to him to have scrolls and butterflies placed permanently on their arms. One of the most daring had a pretty pink and blue kewpie engraved on her leg, above the knee. Another young lady, who loved a sailor from H.M.S. Dunedin, had the outlines of his photograph transferred to her thigh when he went back to England after service here. Later she went to Sydney to meet him on his return. SCALES ON FEET Some strange applications have been made to Mr. Hood. “One lad from up country got me to tattoo his feet with scales, so that he looked as though he had shoes on,” he said. A bald-headed sailor got him to describe a spider’s web over the top of his head to relieve the monotony of bare skin. An array of electrically-driven needles are the main part of Mr. Hood’s stock-in-trade. They have little motors connected to an accumulator and, working something on the principle of the air-pressure drills, they drive a needle rapidly out and in. The needle which protrudes one-six-teenth of an . inch from its holder is traced over the sin to the design of

a transfer or an ink sketch. The needle is dipped in antiseptic ink of the desired colour, red, blue, green, black, for the operation. On the hand it gives a pricking sensation, not hard to bear; but on the chest, according to Mr. Hood, it is “pretty nippy.” A slight swelling occurs a few hours after the operation, but there is no great inconvenience. The troubles of a tattooist include applications tor erasing. “Often chaps come to me and get girls’ names put on, and the next week they are back again and want them taken out,” says Mr. Hood. He performs this operation also, with the help of a mild acid. “There is a dentist here who finds his tattooing interferes with business. I have taken a butterfly off his right arm, a wreath off his neck and a ship off his phest. There’s an eagle and snake to come off yet.” HIS OWN DESIGNS

Mr. Hood firmly believes that tattooing is as good as inoculation for the prevention of some sicknesses, “and that’s a well-known fact in the Navy,” he says. No full-blooded Maoris have ever applied to him, but he has decorated a few half-caste boys. Usually he sketches his own designs and paints them in transferring inks. Then he puts a price on them so that the customer can come in and choose to suit his aesthetic sense and his purse. For instance, a butterfly or a scroll, the work of 10 minutes, costs half-a-crown. A picture of the “Crucifixion,” a popular design, costs 355; and the magnum opus, a “dragon's head on the back,” takes four or five hours to put on, and costs £4. “No tick given” is one of Mr. Hood’s slogans. Once upon a time, when he was.on the Boorara, he put a magnificent design on one of the crew', who guaranteed to settle the account when they paid off in Sydney. A German torpedo tore a 45ft hole in the ship’s side and killed five men, including the decorated one, and Mr. Hood lost his fiver. Hence the slogan.