When telling about the Battle of Hastings, William Malmesbury wrote a description of the English ancestors, the Anglo Saxons, as having “arms covered with golden bracelets, tattooed with coloured patterns.” The trend of tattooing oneself with coloured patterns seems to have fallen to the wayside by the time William Shakespeare was writing about skin used as parchment in Comedy of Errors, because tattoos were far from the everyday normative for your average English citizen in the 16th century. Despite the ancient history of tattoo art on the European continent, for most of the people in Shakespeare’s lifetime, tattoos arrived as a new and noteworthy cultural event when they saw them first as international explorers returned from their oceanic voyages, bringing with them natives who were adorned with ink tattoos. British pilgrims to the Holy Lands in the 17th century would often be tattooed with the Jerusalem Cross as a souvenir from their travels. One famous Britain who had this kind of tattoo done was William Lithgow, who returned to England in 1612, causing quite a cultural splash with his new artwork.Here today to help us explore the place, and reality of tattoos in England during Shakespeare’s lifetime including what kind of tattoos might have been present, from where, and why is our guest, Matt Lodder

 

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