The following is a brief excerpt from Tattoo History: A Source Book, by Stephen G. Gilbert now available in print.

Tattoo History Source Book: Confessions of a Tattoo Addict

"Sailor George Fosdick at work in his studio circa 1930."

Some childhood memories remain vivid although the incidents which inspired them were apparently trivial. For me, one such incident was the first time I saw a tattoo. I must have been about nine or ten. I was sitting on the couch in our living room with my baby sitter and her boyfriend, who was in the navy. He rolled up his sleeve and showed me his tattoos. The red and blue colors seemed to glow with a magic light. He told me that the colors would be there for the rest of his life because the tattoo artist had put them under his skin with needles. I was amazed and enchanted. It was love at first sight.

My parents didn't have tattoos, and neither did any of their friends. They never even talked about tattoos. When I told my father about my discovery, he patiently explained that only criminals, savages, and feeble minded people had tattoos, and that they did it because they didn't have anything better to do. I said I thought tattoos were interesting anyway, and he told me that tattooing seemed interesting to me because I was a child, but that when I grew up I would change my mind. Dad meant well and he was right about a lot of things, but not about that.

By the time I was 12 my parents allowed me to go downtown by myself, and I made another wonderful discovery. There was a man named Sailor George Fosdick who had a tattoo shop near the waterfront. I longed to go in and talk to him, but I didn't because there was a sign on the door which read: "You must be l8 and prove it to get a tattoo." So I stood outside with my nose pressed to the window and watched . Sailor George used a machine that buzzed and gave off blue sparks. I saw blood on the arm of the man he was tattooing, and sometimes the man winced with pain. On the walls were beautiful drawings of sailing ships, anchors, roses, dragons eagles, snakes, and naked women. The whole scene seemed at once dangerous and fascinating. The images on the wall spoke to me of travel, adventure, danger, and sex. In my impressionable young mind tattooing became indelibly associated with these things. They were forbidden but infinitely desirable.

When I was 14 my parents sent me away to a boarding school in Boston, and I discovered something else I hadn't known about. In Scollay Square there was a burlesque theater called the Casino where women with large breasts took off their clothes and danced while people watched them. The Casino had a sign like Sailor George's: "You must be l8...." But my friends told me not to believe it, and I found to my surprise that the girl in the box office was happy to take my money without inquiring about my age. She even smiled and winked at me.

Near the Casino was a tattoo shop owned by a man named Dad Liberty. He had one of those "You must be l8" signs in his window too, but by then I was wise in the ways of the world, and one day I screwed up my courage and swaggered into Dad Liberty's shop and asked him to tattoo a little number l3 on my leg. He matter-of-factly told me to roll up my pants leg, and within a few minutes I had my first tattoo. I was hooked. The next week after the burlesque show I came back for crossed swords on the other leg. I have traveled far through time and space since then, but Dad Liberty's tattoos are still with me, and so is the primitive fascination I felt for tattooing as a child. When I was a teenager I used to think I was something of a freak because no one else I knew had a tattoo, but as I grew older and read about the history of tattooing I discovered that I was not alone. Tattooing in some form has been practiced in most parts of the world since the Stone Age, and has been described by a great variety of authors from ancient times to the present day.

For many years it has been my pleasure to discover historical records of tattooing as it has been practiced in many times and places throughout the world, and in the pages which follow I have reproduced some of these accounts. I have introduced most of these selections with a few pages of background information which will serve to place them in context and provide some scenery against which the drama can be played, for tattooing has never existed in a vacuum. It has always played an important role in the social life of those who practiced it, and throughout history it has appeared in many guises: as a distinguishing mark of royalty, a symbol of religious devotion, a decoration for bravery in battle, a sexual lure, a pledge of love, a symbol of group identification, a sign of individuality, a punishment, and a means of marking and identifying slaves, outcasts and convicts. But behind these many uses of tattooing there lurks a mystery. Why tattoo? All of these purposes could have been accomplished by other means. There seems to be another motive beneath the surface: a primitive, profound and inexplicable fascination with the process of puncturing the skin, letting blood, and consenting to change the body for life. This mystery has been touched on by many of the authors whose work is included here, but it remains a mystery: something which is sensed intuitively, but defies rational explanation.