TATTOOED WOMEN IN THE STATES.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1079, 6 March 1883, Page 3

TATTOOED WOMEN IN THE STATES.

The active'competition between tattooed women in the United States awakens interest. Two in New York have voluntarily submitted themselves to the processes of puncturing aud poisoning necessary to produce the emblazonment which makes Captain Constentenus as picturesque as his name, and now a third is undergoing a few months torture in order that she may be so disfigured that curiosity-seekers may gape at her. This last young woman says cf another woman : ‘ Anybody could be tattooed like her, but it takes nerve to have a solid picture pricked in.’ ‘And are you really illustrated with cuts all over 1 ’ asked the reporter. ‘ Not yet,’ was the reply, ‘ but I’m getting to be.’ An engagement was made for the re porter to be present when the next operation was performed. The reporter was startled, not to say shocked, by the promptness with which she displayed various parts of her anatomical structure when he called at her room. It seemed a trifle immodest for her to show in prorate what she promises to exhibit in public for a living ; but, after a brief struggle with his sense of propriety, he looked with great interest at certainly the most remarkable collection of pictures ever exhibited. The gentleman who devotes his days to the puncturing of his wife’s epidermis is a sailor, or has been one, and has imbibed fo’castlo notions of art, together with his knowledge of tattooing. Accordingly his wife’s arras, legs and body look as if she had had a violent eruption of flags, tombstones, allegorical figures, and moral and patriotic mottoes.

‘ God bless our home,’ ‘ Procrastination is the thief of time,’ ‘ The Union forever,’ fill up the interstices between Melpomene, Calypso, and the grave of Thomas Jefferson ; while a large tricolor adorns the right thigh, and a free-hand sketch of a man-o’-war is pricked into the left. Scores of designs, not two of which are alike, are engraved (so to speak) in the flesh, and the vacant spaces are being filled in day by day by others. ‘ Can I see you put on a new picture P asked the reporter. The Tattooer carefully wetted a small camel’s hair brush in some Indian ink, commonly so called, but which he explained was really Chinese ink, and began

to examine his subject to see where he should begin. After turning her rom d two or three times, he selecied a small white spot on her left shoulder blade, and rapidly sketched a heart punctured by a Cupid’s arrow. Then he chose one of several bunches of needles, and began to prick the ink in.

*I go just deep enough to draw blood,’ said he ; 1 when it comes I stop. Then it immediately swells up like this,’ and he put his finger on a raw sore en her arm. ‘ After three or four days tho scab comes off and it looks like this,’ and he put his finger on her left knee, where there was an angry look’og blotch of the shape of a bird. ‘ Then tho skin peels off twice, and in about a week or more it is all done.’

The woman undergoing the tattooing is +he daughter of a well-to-do farmer in Pennsylvania, and is supported by remittances from home whilst her husband is devoting himself to garnishing her for her dehut. As soon as she shall have been sufficiently bed’zened, which he thinks will be in a few weeks, she is to fulfil an engagement of a year at 20dol a week. Something like the first year’s receipts have been used up while she has been undergoing the torture of preparation ; but she calculates, unless the fashions in tattoo change, to be an attraction to any ‘ show ’ for the rest of her life.