Indelible ink

Long before Dean McDermott immortalized the likeness of bride Tori Spelling on his arm, tattoos were actually revered as art, used for everything from marking criminals to professing undying love to your momma.

1066 King Harold of England, killed in the battle of Hastings, is identified by the tattoo on his chest. It spells “Edith”—the name of the king’s lover. Historical accounts vary, but one popular version says Edith was the only one who knew how to identify Harold’s corpse, because his face had been mutilated.

1612 The first written reports surface of facial tattooing among the indigenous Ainu women of Japan . Their practice of facial tattooing has been discontinued.

1700s Explorer Captain James Cook charts the South Pacific between 1768 and 1771, and spreads the art of tattoo more widely through the Western world. During a visit to Tahiti in July 1769, he writes about tattooing in his journal: “As this is a painful operation especially the tattowing [sic] their buttocks it is perform’d but once in their lifetime, it is never done until they are 12 or 14 years of age.” A few crew members decided to get tattooed, setting the trend of the tattooed sailor for centuries to come. A few seamen also learned the art of tattooing, and by the middle of the 18th century most British ports had at least one professional tattoo artist.

1720 In Japan, the tattooing of criminals replaces amputation of the nose and the ears as punishment. A criminal receives a ring tattoo around the arm for each offense or a character tattoo on his forehead. This is abolished in 1870, when all tattooing is banned in Japan.

1862 The Prince of Wales visits the Holy Land and has the Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his arm, beginning a tattoo craze within the British aristocracy that would last for generations.

1871 Gus Wagner, the “World’s Champion Hand Tattoo Artist and Tattooed Man,” is born. Wagner has a 40-year career as a traveling tattooist and circus performer. He was a Luddite when it came to electric tattooing machines (see 1892); he continued to work with hand-held instruments, “hand-poking” his work until his death in 1941.

1891 During an excavation in Egypt, archaeologists discover a tattooed mummy identified as Amunet (2160–1994 B.C.), a priestess whose body art included an elliptical pattern below her navel.

1892 Samuel O’Reilly invents the electric tattoo machine in his tattoo shop in New York’s Bowery, revolutionizing the art form. He modifies Thomas Edison’s Electric Engraving Pen by changing the tube tip to hold ink and combining the pen with a rotary-cam machine to push the needle into the skin.

1911 Sailor Jerry (Jerry Collins), considered the great master of American tattoo, is born. The hearts, anchors and pinups that are now classic tattoo images sprang from his pen.

1920s Author Albert Parry writes that the post-war days were busier for tattooists “when flocks of girls fluttered into the tattoo shops to get that artificial beauty spot, eternal red lips, tiny flowers, kewpie dolls or united hearts.”

1948 Tattooing becomes legal again in Japan. The ban never applied to foreigners, and many sailors were tattooed there.

1970 Janis Joplin dies. According to the coroner’s report, “There is…a small heart tattooed over…the left breast.” A year later, San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle tells an NBC reporter that more than 100 girls have asked for the same heart-shaped tattoo. In the ’70s and ’80s, rock stars, athletes, models and movie stars start inking and continue to popularize tattooing as a renaissance of body art in the name of self-expression and rebellious, nouveau vogue.

1991 Hikers discover a frozen body in the mountains along the border between Italy and Austria. The 5,300-year-old frozen mummy from the Bronze Age, called Otzi, sports tattoos, including a cross behind his left knee and a series of parallel lines on the ankles.

2003 The Guinness Book of World Records declares Australian Lucky Diamond Rich to be the world’s most tattooed human. Rich told one reporter that the most painful part of the inking process was not on his privates, but on the soles of his feet and palms of his hands.

2006 Archaeologists in Peru discover a 1,500-year-old “exquisitely preserved and elaborately tattooed mummy of a young woman” in a tomb.