European sailors were marking their skin at least 200 years before Captain James Cook’s 1769 visit to Tahiti, which only gave English the word tattoo from the Polynesian tatau. Sixteenth century Mediterranean crews pricked crucifixes and lovers’ names into their arms, and 1720s newspapers in Virginia and Maryland described blue initials made with gunpowder or soot. The marks had grim practical uses: identifying drowned men and proving identity. After the American Revolution, U.S. protection papers recorded sailors’ tattoos to fight British impressment, and after the 1789 mutiny on HMS Bounty, William Bligh described the tattoos of 21 of the 25 mutineers.

By the 19th century shipboard artists used sail needles and India ink, and Herman Melville’s White-Jacket describes two who cleared upward of $400 a cruise. Retired sailors opened shore shops, Martin Hildebrandt in the 1870s and Hans J. Hansen in Copenhagen in 1884, and Samuel O’Reilly’s electric machine, adapted from Thomas Edison’s electric pen, produced the bold American traditional look. Historian B.R. Burg found no 19th century records of pig and chicken tattoos, suggesting many fixed meanings came from Albert Parry’s 1933 book. After a 1950s slump, Don Ed Hardy and Sailor Jerry flash drove a revival.

• On the USS Adams in the 1880s, 29 percent of deckhands were tattooed versus 4 percent of specialists.
• By 1908 about 90 percent of American man-of-war sailors were reportedly tattooed.
• Around World War I sailors had nude pinups tattooed with clothing to pass Navy rules.
• Tom of Finland and Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male campaign recast the tattooed sailor as a gay icon.
• In 2017 the Royal New Zealand Navy approved a Maori ta moko face tattoo for a serving sailor.