Paul Sayce wrote one thousand and one tattooing facts that were compiled during the last four years through video- and audio-taped interviews with many of the world’s leading tattoo artists and fans since 1983, when Paul started writing articles for Lionel Titchener’s Tattoo Club Of Great Britain’s Tattoo International monthly magazine. Other source material has been obtained from the British Tattoo History Museum in Oxford, England in his capacity as the museum’s curator.

Today, we are going to share with you facts 21 through 40.

By Paul Sayce

www.tattoo.co.uk

21. Dickie Reynolds tattooed for fifty years in Melbourne, Australia before retiring in 1985. Is thought to be one of the longest-serving tattoo artists in Australian tattooing history.

22. In Perth, Western Australia in 1960 there was only one tattoo artist and his name was Bob Thornton.

23. Betty Cusko of Australia was a heavily tattooed female who was featured in the Kobel photograph collection of the 1950s. It is not known if she worked the sideshow circuits.

24. South London tattoo artist Barry Louvaine did the artwork for the cover of The Stranglers’ 1984 hit “Skin Deep.” CBS records gave Barry full credit for this on the E.P.’s back cover liner notes.

25. Walker’s Crisps gave away free, stick-on tattoos with their Cheetos Puffs snacks in the year 2000.

26. In 1969, cult American rock singer, composer and lyricist Jim Morrison of the band The Doors had a book of his poetry published entitled The Lords and The New Creatures in a limited edition of one hundred copies, which he gave to family and friends. On pages sixty-six and one hundred and four, there are two poems that mention tattooing.

27. Roman emperor Julius Caesar wrote that all Britons stain their skins with woad, and Herod of Antioch noted that the Britons had animal designs incised onto their bodies.

28. The Picts of Scotland also painted their bodies in blue woad, and many believe that they were also tattooed.

29. In 325 A.D., Emperor Constantine the Great banned facial tattoos among Christians living in the Roman Empire because it disfigured what was fashioned in God’s image. In 787 A.D., the British Council of Churches at Calcuth, Northumberland, under the direction of the second council of Nicaea (the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Christianity), banned all body markings as a pagan practice.

30. In the days before overseas holidays, sailors would bring home souvenirs of travel in rather the same way as one would bring home a gift today. For sailors in a bygone age, a tattoo was the souvenir of a well-traveled man.

31. In the journal of British settler John Smith (1579?1631), he recorded how he was saved by a thirteen-year-old girl named Pocahontas. Not only was he saved, he was subsequently adopted by the tribe. In his writings, he also said that the Indians of Virginia decorated their bodies with black spots on their arms, legs and faces.

32. In the autobiography So You Can (published in 2001) from Japanese lawyer Mitsuyo Ohira, she writes, “It is never to late to start over.” So You Can has sold over two million copies and she became the deputy-mayor of the Osaka region of Tokyo in 2003. Mitsuyo has a full Japanese tattoo backpiece and, when she was once asked in a magazine article if she was going to get rid of her tattoos, she was quoted as saying, “It’s possible to erase them, of course, but even if I do so, it is not going to change anything. The past will not run a different course because I got rid of my tattoos. Changing the surface doesn’t change what is underneath. I’ll keep my tattoos until I die.”

33. In issue seventy-two of July 1991’s DC Marvel comic “Avengers Westcoast–Irezumi the Tattoo Spirit,” Stan Lee presented the main feature entitled “Chaos and Chrysanthemums,” in which the  Ironman does battle with the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuza. Of course, there was the totally tattooed Yakuza member, who went by the name (you’ve guessed it) Irezumi (the Japanese name for tattoo). But it wasn’t the man who fought, it was his tattoos that gave the Ironman a bit of a bashing. So, to fight Irezumi, you had to fight the tattoos first. This DC comic has a painted cover of a man with tattoos of Marvel comic heroes tattooed on him.

34. Keen Manchester United soccer fan Shaun Southwick was so besotted with his team that in 2000 he had all of the club’s sixty honors tattooed on his back.

35. The record album Indelibly Stamped (released June 1971) had on its cover tattooed lady Marion Hollier, not Rusty Skuse, whom many people believe the picture on the sleeve to be. Marion Hollier was a great fan of the Bristol Tattoo Club meetings in the 1960s and was tattooed extensively by Les Skuse Sr. It is not known why she had Bill and Rusty tattooed on her forearm or, indeed, what became of her.

36. On the sixteenth of February, 2000 in Glasgow, Scotland, a man tried to trick police into thinking that they were questioning his brother, forgetting that his real name was tattooed across his knuckles.

37. Back in the days of the pop group Take That, Robbie Williams was tattooed by Hollywood Mark (Favela) in Hanky Panky’s tattoo studio in Amsterdam, Holland. Mark has also tattooed the Dutch soccer superstar Patrick Kluivert.

38. In the years 1893?’94, 1896?’97 and 1898?1900, the Dutch government sponsored Dr. Anton Nieuwenhuis in three expeditions to Borneo to study the Dayaks of Kalimantan (Borneo being at the time a part of the Dutch East Indies). One hundred years later, tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher (a.k.a. Hanky Panky) and lead singer of the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis, followed in Nieuwenhuis’s footsteps in their quest to discover the tattooing practices of the Dayak headhunters of the region, which the pair documented in their book De Grote Borneo Expeditie.

39. Originally named the Civic Hall, she later became the Queensway Hall, Dunstable. Its foundation stone was laid by the mayor of Dunstable, M.L. Kilby, on the third of October, 1963 and was officially opened by the Mayor of London, C. James Harman, on the sixteenth of April, 1964. And from the second tattoo expo convention of 1987 to the closing of the hall in 1999, this venue played host to Britain’s premier tattooing and body arts show.

40. The first British Tattoo History Museum (389 Cowley Road, Oxford, England) was opened in 1983. A former junk shop, then a butcher’s shop, it was built in 1925.

Source: http://tattooroadtrip.com/1001-tattoo-facts-21-40/