And all of the pictures from the Victorian era show the inkings carried out by one of the first ever tattoo artists - Sutherland Macdonald. Sutherland began working professionally as a tattoo ...

Wellcome Collection under CC BY SA-4.0 The 75,688 tattoos cataloged in the Digital Panopticon database of Victorian era convicts depict a dizzying array of subjects. A “habitual criminal ...

was just one of 58,002 Victorian convicts whose tattoo descriptions we found as we data-mined the judicial archives. At the time, some commentators believed that “persons of bad repute” used ...

(Though some were forcibly tattooed.) Ink liberated Victorian-era women outside the circus as well. Wealthy socialites, for example, got tattoos as a form of rebellion. At the time, social mores ...