The Modified Body: The Nineteenth-Century Tattoo as Fugitive Stigmata

During the nineteenth century, scholars studying the practice of tattooing established two of the most enduring myths surrounding the European tattoo. The first concerned its origins—that tattooing in Europe was imported, the result of encounters between explorers, merchants, and other European itinerants and the "primitive" peoples they met on their journeys. This was a view favoured by many European scholars, particularly in France, where a newly powerful bourgeoisie filled the ranks of the rapidly developing medical and legal professions. As historian Jane Caplan writes,

Tattooing was commonly represented in nineteenth-century European cultural sciences as a literal marker of the primitive: lines drawn on the body mapped the boundary between the savage and the civilized, and potentially endorsed the cultural superiority of the Europeans.

("'Speaking Scars'" 112)

But how to explain the presence of tattooing among supposedly civilized Europeans? The popularity of tattooing within the working classes was profoundly disturbing to some European observers and posed a more serious question: if tattooing was the sign of a savage state, did that mean that the European populace was at risk of slipping backwards, degenerating into moral atavism? Could tattooing in this context then be the mark of the deviant, whose aberrant nature led him to pursue a life of criminality? Thus the second and more historically enduring myth was consolidated: the conviction that, among Europeans, tattooing was intrinsically bound up with deviance and criminality.

Many nineteenth-century criminological studies of the tattoo pursued these broad lines of inquiry. Yet the tattoo also presented an irresistible opportunity; as a kind of "self-imposed stigmata," it offered unique possibilities for the identification of repeat offenders (Angel 168). Thus the question of the tattoo as a reliable marker of identity became a serious concern for crime scientists during the early decades of the century. From around 1830 onward, medico-legal interest in the anatomy of the tattoo was primarily concerned with investigating the indelibility of the mark, which had significant implications for the forensic potential of the tattoo as an identifying feature. Pathologists Jean Mathurin Félix Hutin (1804–92) and Auguste Ambroise Tardieu (1818–79) were among the first to carry out studies on the permanency of tattooing. Tardieu stressed that the primary aim of such research was "to fix [the tattoo's] value as a sign of identity" (qtd. in Caplan, "'One of the Strangest Relics'" 342). Thus tattoos became a cogent part of the developing repertoire of French police science. However, the scope for identification of criminals by their tattoos was ultimately limited to that of any other distinguishing physical feature, and, despite their indelibility, tattoos could always be made less conspicuous, altered or augmented over time. Notwithstanding the efforts of police scientists, "tattoo images were not readily assimilable to the serialized systems of measurement and classification that had meanwhile been devised for the body's other physical signs" (Caplan, "'One of the Strangest Relics'" 344). In light of these difficulties, interest in the tattoo as a sign of identity gradually waned throughout the 1860s and 1870s.

By the 1880s, a new, broader shift in criminological discourse was taking place. Whereas earlier schools of penology focused on the anatomy of the crime, the new criminology and police practice, associated in France with Alphonse Bertillon, now advocated an approach that focused on the anatomy of the criminal. At this point, and to some extent under the influence of theories of social Darwinism, the tattoo as a marker of individual identity was replaced by a view of the tattoo as the stigmata of a "collectively pathological criminal class" (Caplan, "'One of the Strangest Relics'" 344).

In this context, criminological studies of the symbolism of the tattoo coincided with a renewed interest in practical methods of tattoo removal. Microscopial studies of cross-sections of tattooed skin were carried out on cadavers in prisons and hospitals in order to establish where precisely the ink particles lay in the dermis. Of the practising physicians with an academic interest in the tattoo and its removal during the later nineteenth century, Dr. Gaston-Félix-Joseph Variot...