Episode 302: Late Night On The Ledge - plant tattoos with Dr Matt Lodder

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Transcript

[0:00] Music.

[0:15] Jane Perrone Hello and welcome to On The Ledge podcast, Late Night edition. I'm Jane Perrone, your host, and this week we're talking tattoos.

[0:26] Music.

[0:30] Jane Perrone I'm joined by Dr. Matt Lodder, tattoo expert and senior lecturer in art history and theory at the University of Essex, to find out all the things you need to know about the role of plants in tattoos.

[0:50] Music.

[0:50] Jane Perrone Before we get on to that though, important announcement about On The Ledge. As you know, the show's been going for seven and a half years now and I've been plugging away for all that time making episodes pretty much continually, barring maybe a month here or there, and I've decided it's time to take a sabbatical from the show. This will give me a chance to have a think about the future direction of the show. Obviously I've started to incorporate more video into the show which brings its own challenges. Also I have a project that I'm working on that's taking up a lot of my time up till the end of this year. So it felt like a good time to take a break from the show.

[1:34] Jane Perrone Fear not though there's a a bit more to go before the break so there's this episode you're about to listen to, then there is going to be a bonus episode which marks the launch of my audio book of The Wild Garden by William Robinson. So I am joined in a bonus episode by a biographer of William Robinson to find out more about this chap and how he contributed to the way we garden today that's coming up after this episode. And then the very final episode will be out probably in early September and that will be another video episode. Yes, we're going video again for that one. That will be with Ben Newell, who is Worcester Terrariums, an amazing content creator and terrarium maker, finding out all about his work, his life in a Late Night On The Ledge style. So before I go, we're going out with a bang. And as I say, I'm not seeing this as the end for On The Ledge. It's a pause.

[2:40] Jane Perrone When am I coming back? I hope it'll be at the end of the year. I will keep you posted as things develop and as I settle down into what I want to do next with On The Ledge. If you are a Patreon subscriber, I will have sent you a message already explaining this and telling you how this will affect your either monthly or annual payments. Basically, the Patreon will be paused. You'll still be able to access everything, but you won't be paying for the privilege of just waiting for me to return. And if you have any questions, as always, just drop me a line, whether you're a Patreon subscriber or not, I'd love to hear from you. Patreon subscribers can get in touch via a direct message on Patreon or you can drop me an email ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com.

[3:30] Music.

[3:34] Jane Perrone Let's get on and enjoy this week's episode and find out more about how plants fit into the world of tattooing with Matt Lodder. Before we start, a quick reminder this is a Late Night On The Ledge episode. What does that mean? Well, it's a bit like a late night chat show where we might go a little bit off topic. We might use some swear words and discuss things that may be more sensitive and younger ears will not be wanting to hear. So bear that in mind as you start listening to this episode. And if you want to go and check out the archive, there's another 250+ episodes for you to enjoy which don't contain that kind of content so that's your final warning.

[4:24] Music.

[4:24] Dr Matt Lodder Hi I'm Dr Matt Lodder I am a senior lecturer in art history and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Essex. I'm a historian of tattooing um I've just written and well I say just written- I wrote a book called painted people um which came out in paperback back into last year and I'm working on another one right now so yeah really happy to be here.

[4:50] Jane Perrone Well thank you so much for joining me. I'm just going to cut in and say that this is my sort of I'm doing a Late Night kind of edition for this so we are allowed to swear - hooray - because normally my podcast doesn't include swearing but as somebody who swears quite a lot, we're allowed to swear. So if you need- if you need to swear about anything-

[5:07] Dr Matt Lodder I mean always

[5:08] Jane Perrone It's, the opportunities there.

[5:11] Dr Matt Lodder It's my constant state of being.

[5:12] Jane Perrone Now, I feel very underprepared, not in the sense of I haven't read your book. I have read your book, but in the sense that I have no tattoos, as I discussed with you earlier.

[5:20] Dr Matt Lodder Yet.

[5:21] Jane Perrone Yes, my husband did say that to me. He said, are you going to come back and say, I've got ink? So I don't think so, but maybe I'll be persuaded. So this is a fascinating topic. Everyone I meet who's into plants has interesting planty tattoos. But I guess what I want to know is... Leaves and flowers they've always been on tattoos haven't they? But why is it that now and in the past they've been such a common motif what is it that we love about these plants that we want to put them on our bodies?

[5:51] Dr Matt Lodder Yeah I mean so talking about talking about motif up up top I mean flowers just make a good you know that there's a reason they're this kind of decorative staple in in decorative art um generally right like we see flowers on and not just in contemporary culture but in in ancient cultures and cultures all over the world, we see them on clothing, on pots, on jewellery, on furniture design. They are a kind of decorative staple, a decorative staple, part of folk art imagery cross-culturally. Even planting flowers itself is a decorative act in many ways. So if you think about tattooing primarily, first and foremost, as a kind of decorative act, it kind of makes sense. There's this kind of continuity I think I always want to say between tattooing and the visual cultures it emerges from.

[6:40] Dr Matt Lodder In terms of actually like the kind of if you want to get into sort of symbolism I mean I'm I'm a little bit worried often about kind of over determining meaning in tattooing but you know just like in fine art um flowers make good quite basic you know symbols for some of the most kind of profound concerns and joys of human life right. Like they're symbols of of hope and of fertility and of new beginnings but they're also you know if you think of um dutch flower painting as a good example they're good symbols of you know the fragility of life the kind of memento mori right flowers bloom and and give you know beauty and joy and then they wither and die and then they're kind of recycled. So they become these kind of quite basic, quite fundamental symbols in art generally for mortality. And of course, as I always want to say, if you want to be an art historian and you want to read things into people and places and cultures and times from the art that's in museums and churches. You must also be able to do that probably in a particular way for the art people wear on their bodies. And so, you know, we find...

[7:57] Dr Matt Lodder Flower tattooing working as as memento mori as as symbols of love you know just as you'd give someone a bunch of flowers to symbolize you you were thinking of them. All those kind of things all these very basic human desires, drives, worries, concerns are kind of you know articulatable let's say through through floral motif right.

[8:19] Jane Perrone I'm always amazed by the ingenuity of people who have tattoos done it the the preparation that goes into thinking about the meaning of something, the meaning of a plant, where they're putting it on their body, how it fits in with their existing tattoos. This is something that people are really engaged with as an artistic process.

[8:42] Dr Matt Lodder Yeah I mean I think I think probably you know a lot of the time the certainly in the contemporary western culture like the the the decorative impulse comes first. I want a tattoo. And then the kind of meaning emerges from that um over time. I mean there's a there's a nice example my um. There's this incredible Australian, she's actually Irish Australian this performance artist called Sandra Minchin-Delohery. About 10 years ago, probably even more than that now, um she actually had a full copy of Jan Davidsz de Heem's flower painting back piece done.

[9:20] Dr Matt Lodder You know her whole back turned into this kind of still life flower painting and that that takes some commitment and thought. But she got some she got a grant from the uh I think it was the australian arts council she was in a PhD in fine art in Melbourne and she the idea was she'd get that she'd turn her body basically into a still life and then to really push this kind of memento mori artistic kind of comparison you know um she decided she'd donate her eventually when she passed away she'd donate her skin to a museum to be you know become an artwork. So her her death her rebirth could be like actuated through this through turning herself into an artwork in quite a deliberate way. So I mean most people don't go that far um but the but I think the symbolisms there that she's playing with in that piece um are it certainly you know something something all those lines are happening in in all tattoos if you want to read them in that way right.

[10:17] Jane Perrone I worry for some people that they're going to get some rare house plant tattooed on their body and then the plant's gonna die maybe then that's the way of keeping it alive ad infinitum because you know lots of plants do die on you. Some people have these tattoos done and then perhaps it lasts longer than the plant I don't know.

[10:35] Dr Matt Lodder I'm sure they will do right like the kind of the joke there was one tattooer this guy called Samuel Steward who in one in a book that he wrote back in the 90s basically said you know tattoos last for life plus six months you know your tattoos on you forever and then. For a bit long as it rots away in the ground. So, I mean, I'd hope, I'd hope unless you, you know, there is, I'm sure there are plant species that will last longer than the human lifespan. But like, I'm sure if you're- probably easier to keep a plant on your body alive than it is to keep, certainly if you're me, with my kind of very, what's the opposite of green thumbs, black thumbs? I don't know.

[11:11] Jane Perrone Yeah, it's, I mean, we all kill plants. That's the, that's the bottom line. But I can see how immortalising them on your skin is one way of keeping that memory alive, perhaps, of a plant that you've lost. Um but this brings us to a question that I, that was answered reading your book but perhaps you could share with listeners is how do you actually go about researching this stuff because in the book you go back way back into the history of tattooing but obviously um before the age of photography how do we know what people were putting on their bodies bearing in mind that uh you know bodies rot away skin deteriorates.

[11:45] Dr Matt Lodder It is a is a difficulty and actually most of my sort of hardcore academic research is in the Victorian um and like Edwardian periods or you know the 19th and 20th century let's say. So I I had generally sort of skirted that issue in some senses um but I have friends and colleagues and other people who work on kind of ancient tattooing and some some skin does survive um in uh you know either naturally preserved, so we the oldest tattoo specimens we've yet found are 5500 years old um they date back to um you know the the late copper early bronze age naturally preserved when the their bearer um a man who's now called Ötzi, the Iceman kind of died in the Austro-italian alps um no flowers on him unfortunately he's just got some tally marks on him um.

[12:37] Dr Matt Lodder Or you or they're preserved the other cold is one way to preserve them another way to do it is um is like dry preserving mummification basically and there are naturally preserved mummies from pre-dynastic Egypt from around the same age, so three and a half thousand years BCE five thousand years ago um which were men and women who died naturally in conditions that has meant that their bodies survived through to the present. Also I'm trying to think there are kind of so there's a there's a female specimen at the British Museum uh called the Gebelein woman this Sudanese Nubian woman and she has tattoos on her they're not directly floral but some some academics have kind of interpreted them as such. So there are so there are these kind of you know ancient skin preservation techniques I mean for me actually the really difficult thing is, Not just, not the fact that tattoos are recorded in photography or in record keeping. So even in the periods that I look at, there's, you know, there's things like criminal description ledgers, sailor description books, enlistment cards, descriptions in newspapers, things like that.

[13:51] Dr Matt Lodder But that's obviously only ever going to be a very, very small proportion of the kind of tattoos that were done. You know, quote unquote, average people were not having their bodies recorded. So if you go looking for, let's say, criminal tattoos, or let's say you're looking for tattoos and the history of tattooing in the archive, you will find sailor tattoos and criminal tattoos most easily because they're the people that had their bodies recorded for people to come and look at in future. And it's much harder to kind of unpick from those records, even where we have records, what the broader picture is. Yeah so it's a constant challenge but I think what what's been the challenge of my research career has been trying to pay attention to that you know what I call the archival lens figure out what's missing what could be missing and even what does this surveilled data set tell us you know these people come into the system as criminals and sailors but perhaps their tattooing is indicative of some broader facet of their life um you know they're not reducible to that that mark on their body right.

[14:51] Jane Perrone And is it, as is the case with the Victorians in many senses, that uh there was a lot that was hidden in that you'd have people that were unexpectedly tattooed that would never be shown but-

[15:02] Dr Matt Lodder This is exactly the problem and it's you know and the joy of it is and even I mean this this comes right up even to the you know I used to have a lot of conversations with people um you know born in the you know post-war baby boom and he said there were no tattoos when I was a kid and I was like I mean there was definitely fewer than today but there was a lot of tattooing but not a lot of it was happening on hands and faces, people weren't wearing shorts and t-shirts to work so yeah. Loads and loads of tattooing and the majority of tattooing in the western world has been under clothing and so you have so even people that were tattooed so a good example um Edward the Seventh um tattooed in Jerusalem uh Easter April 1862 no images of his tattoos have yet been discovered because in his in his official portraits and in you know his even his family portraits he's not rolling his sleeves up to show show his tattoos you know. So yeah so so much is happening under clothing um and and that makes it really difficult.

[16:05] Dr Matt Lodder The other interesting wrinkle, and I haven't really started looking into this properly, but it's based on some work that was done fairly recently, is that. Also, a lot of tattooing doesn't show up in early photographic techniques. So in wet collodion photography, if you've ever seen a lot of those wet collodion prints, they tend to make things a lot darker. They tend to make bright colours dark because they can't, and skies are often very dark, because that process, as I understand it, can't represent blue properly because the process filters out blue. Blue and of course lots of certainly kind of early 19th century of the time amateur tattoos would have been more or less blue um by the time they'd healed and so they're just even if you had photographs these people they're not going to show up um there was some interesting work by a guy in New Zealand who was noticing that this uh you know particularly applied to for example men who had facial moko, traditional Māori facial tattooing which just didn't show up in photography so you know we've got all this problem, the physical, the archival, the documentary, and then as well the sort of social stigmatic as well, which makes this stuff just really kind of disappear.

[17:18] Dr Matt Lodder So it's made it very challenging. One of the things really that's become easier over the course of my career is that more stuff is digitised, more stuff is accessible um and even stuff that is not digitised it is easy to find out where it is you know so even if I have to travel to go and see it and spend a lot of time negotiating with archivists and librarians. I know where it is. And that kind of work just wasn't possible in the pre-digital era, you know.

[17:50] Jane Perrone Yeah, absolutely. Now, plants obviously have been the subject of tattoos, but there are also certain plants that have been involved in the actual process of tattoos. Let's get into this because this is fascinating stuff. I, as somebody who hasn't been tattooed, I guess I have a very basic understanding of what's even happening in modern tattooing. But I imagine in history, there's been lots of different ways of getting a pigment into somebody's skin.

[18:16] Dr Matt Lodder Yeah. So the basic process is pretty straightforward and hasn't changed forever. For the oldest tattoos we have are five and a half thousand years old. The estimates from paleoanthropologists suggest that tattoos at least 45 could be 100,000 years old. So but the basic technology is make a wound in your body somehow uh and that's deep enough to hit the dermal layer so you've got your skin's got three layers you need to hit the middle layer because that's where the immune system works in the way that preserves tattoos, get some pigment in there let it heal and you'll have that mark on you forever um and of course um a huge amount of plant material has been involved in um in making that happen right so in a couple of ways the first is pigments, maybe we can start talking about pigmentation.

[19:05] Dr Matt Lodder Um, like the, the, the, the oldest, uh, like tattoo ink recipe that we have was from the 6th century BCE from a Roman physician called Aëtius of Amida. And this is basically one pound of Egyptian pine bark. Two ounces of corroded bronze ground with vinegar, two ounces of gall nut, which is with insect egg deposits in from trees, and then one ounce of vitriol, so iron sulfate. So this mix of mineral and botanic charcoal, basically, to make ink. Most basic traditional and ancient preserved tattoos are black, and they are made from carbon, often from soot or from lamp black or from just ashes. But in some particular cultural traditions, that there was a particular kind of plant or a particular process to make that ink, if you like. The other really interesting wrinkle here, you may have heard this about Woad and the ancient Britons. So Julius Caesar, when he came to Britain, Britain, by the way, the name for Britain, which is one of the books called Painted People, One of the theories, one of the kind of predominant theories linguistically is that it means something like land of the painted people, people of the forms from a kind of proto-Celtic word. And Julius Caesar basically describes seeing these people who were coloured in Latin, coloured blue with what Caesar records as vitrum in latin.

[20:59] Dr Matt Lodder And vitrum had traditionally been translated as as woad this blue flowering plant and for centuries you know pushing on millennia now there was this idea that the the ancient Britains that the the the warriors you know from the south and from Kent all the way up into Scotland and where the Pictish tribes uh lived were tattooing their bodies with with woad with this pigment made from from this blue flowering plant um and like lots of lots of lines of evidence have sort of start in the last sort of 20 or 30 years have started really debunking that idea. So number one is just basically we've we um found some iron age, bog bodies and they had pigment on their bodies, not in their bodies, they had they were preserved but they had a clay layer on their body decoratively rather than having tattoos in their skin um so there's a suggestion that actually this wasn't tattooing at all it was a it was just a kind of war paint if you like. The Romans knew about tattooing they used it for um punishing punishing slaves and it was known from from some of their neighbouring tribes um but essentially we have this It's like a two millennia long sort of game of telephone, if you like, where Caesar says, yeah, they're painted with vitrum.

[22:21] Dr Matt Lodder So no tools have been found. Some archaeologists have argued that various kind of compacts of needles and things were used for tattooing, but they seem to more likely be things like net making and stuff like that. Difficult to tell them apart. But when it comes to the botanical stuff, like, A, there's some argument that actually vitrum doesn't actually mean woad. It actually means kind of glass it's the same word is used in latin for glass and it might be a kind of a mineral glass that's blue in color um rather than woad and and they have they haven't found evidence even that woad was cultivated or grown in in Rome in Roman or pre-Roman Britain um it's complicated lines of evidence there are some people that say that we found some some indigo woad seeds um I'm sure some of your listeners will know more about this than I do but... Essentially, one little linguistic translation and a kind of misunderstanding by Roman sources has led to centuries of misunderstanding. And those Roman sources about the woad and about the ancient Britons and the painted people became kind of the staple way that early Britain, early modern and even kind of late medieval Britain antiquarian historians thought about themselves, they understood themselves to be the the inheritors of the legacy of the painted people that we were the kind of tough painted barbarians um and that persisted right up to the you know, the moment when the New World was encountered by Columbus and others.

[23:58] Dr Matt Lodder There were tattooed people discovered in the Americas and Europeans basically said, they're a bit weird. They're painted, they're tattooed, they're marked. But don't worry, our ancestors were just like that. So this mistranslation of a botanic, potentially botanical term, or you know argued mistranslation to a potential botanical term has led to like millennia of cultural identity formation in a way that I think is really interesting you know. I know you do this with with flowers right like we're not just talking about flowers, I'm not talking about tattoos, I'm talking about what these things can tell us about all kinds of other things yeah.

[24:33] Jane Perrone Absolutely and you know uh I also seem to remember from the book or from your talk your talk you did a talk at the Lindley Library uh on this topic um that you're also talking about, am I right in thinking cactus thorns being used as like a means of uh what's the word piercing the skin.

[24:53] Dr Matt Lodder Yeah so so I mean there's plenty of other kind of pigment- pigmented plants from around the world maybe we can come to those too but like when it comes when it comes to um the tools yeah like again you need something sharp up and often that's you know in the bronze age it's those that seems to have been likely to have been bronze needles um in some cultures it's animal bone um but in in some places it is basically spiky plants and um we have good evidence right of um of uh for example in the uh. I need to get this right what they they're called the uh Basket Maker II culture from Utah or what is modern-day Utah, for example, discovered 2,000-year-old tattooing tools that are basically cactus spines bound to a yucca haft in order to create the needle complex, in order to put the ink in. And, you know, there's lots and lots of kind of...

[25:56] Dr Matt Lodder Analogs for that kind of thing around the world like in my book there's a story about tattooing in Fiji um where it's a primarily female practice done by women on women um although my book tells a story of a woman uh called Adi Lebaleba this young Fijian woman tattooing this curious uh European anthropologist um Baron Anatole von Hügel who started the Museum of Anthropology in Cambridge um with their traditional tooling um which is made from lemon thorns. So they they would again strap or tie lemon thorns to a haft a lot of traditional tattooing uh is done in in some many cultures in particularly in the Pacific is done with what we call hafted tools so it's a long handle with the needles at a right angle to it and you tap it and you end up with this basically sort of bouncing motion which moves the um the the ink stained, pigment stained needle tip in and out of your body um and actually you know i think these kind of tools also give us a sense of how cultural traditions might have begun because one can imagine you know pricking your finger or pricking your arm on a cactus spine um getting some dirt or some a speck from the fire into that wound it healing up and never disappearing. And you and you go oh wait a minute that- we could you we could use that right and you can see over time over millennia how... Things that happen almost you know almost sort of accidentally as part of the the general process of being alive in a in a spiky world um can lead to the development of these techniques right.

[27:36] Jane Perrone Yeah, well, I can testify to that, having been many, many times attacked by various succulents, both my own and visiting gardens. It's it is. Yeah, I can see that. I mean, I guess this is one of the reasons why I fear I guess my my pain tolerance is basically zero. That's probably why I haven't got any tattoos. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure that there's a whole there's a whole chat to be had about tattoos, pain. The whole process.

[28:07] Dr Matt Lodder Well, when Europeans started writing and documenting tattooing in, for example, Tahiti, so there's this kind of myth that tattooing was discovered in the Pacific, by Captain Cook and Captain Cook's fleet, which is absolutely 100% not true at all. You know, as I said, antiquarian Britons knew about ancient tattooing. There was a huge tradition of pilgrimage tattooing from the late 1500s. There was tattooed peoples from the Americas coming to Britain and Europe from the late 1400s all the way through. So tattooing itself wasn't new, but the particular kind of practices and rituals and social meanings of tattooing in places like Tahiti and New Zealand and Fiji were new. And whenEnglish and French and German writers were talking about tattooing, a lot of tattooing in places like Fiji where tattooing is as I said a female practice it's done on young women as a as a kind of marker of adulthood - basically as a kind of transition into adulthood. Andthe local population, the local tattooers were just amazed that you know these Europeans were so horrified because look this is a tiny little child it's - It's fine it's hardcore, and taking this what are you what are you worried about?

[29:29] Dr Matt Lodder And that became a bit of a kind of interesting sort of cultural moment, a cultural difference where Europeans were mocked even for kind of thinking that this was such a horrible and unpleasant thing because they'd all done it themselves and been fine, right?

[29:42] Jane Perrone Tell me about some of the other plants involved in the sort of the whole pigment business - I mean I guess it must have been localized as according to what was actually growing in the vicinity and therefore quite different in different continents and countries?

[29:56] Dr Matt Lodder Yeah that's right - so there are all these kind of local local traditions, I thinkthe most kind of specific specifically ritualized one is perhaps this practice that comes from New Zealand and from the Pacific in general. So for example this practice in New Zealand is called Tā Moko and it's a practice with sort of deep and specific cultural significance which mI' not qualified to actually adequately explain so please if you're interested in this go and read stuff written by by Maori anthropologists who know about this but in terms of kind of the actual practice - the physical details of the practice, I can of course tell you about. Sopart of the part of the ritual to create Tā Moko is to use a pigment container made from a hinau tree, is that how that's pronounced? Eleocarpus dentatus. Māhoe, which is whiteywood. Pōporo, black nightshade. That's all mixed together. You have this kind of container, which is made from essentially a kind of coconut or some kind of big seed. And you mix all of these plants and berries and pieces of kind of medicinal herbs up to make this pigment and then it ends up being the specific, the pigment that you would use in order to make your pigment. There'd often also be this kind of mixture of what's called kauri gum, which is a kind of, this really, I was reading about this, I didn't know anything about this, again maybe your listeners know about this, this is a kind of almost like a sap that is almost like amber and it's very, very valuable. It can be found in these enormous clumps, if you're lucky, and they're very, very valuable because it's this kind of long process of sap formation, this kauri gum. And that gets mixed with soot from burning white pine and ends up being part of the process.

[32:16] Dr Matt Lodder There's also this um yeah there's also kind of interesting uh practice in uh samoa, where um oh sorry in Madagascar, this is the Madagascan stuff, which is made from like crab apples or cashew apples basically so the apple that the cashew nut grows in um which grow in grow in Madagascar - that was used to make tattooing for facial, make ink for facial tattooing there. Also you get those needles made from the spines of the Madagascar palm mixed with sugar and charcoal with the juice of the cashew apple and afterwards treated with plant medicine including poultices from the monkey pod tree so you have this kind of you know complete kind of circuit, I suppose o f tool, pigment, folk medicine and magic, and then actual practical disinfectant and healing properties all coming together to kind of ritualize and create this important practice.

[33:26] Jane Perrone It's fascinating stuff and the Iguess the interesting thing about social media and globalization is that now these very specific practices like moko, I mean the reason why i know about it is through the guy from the band Alien Weaponry who's on TikTok who talks a lot about his moco. And so I knew nothing about it until i I heard him talking about it on TikTok, the meaning to him and, you know, answering people's questions direct from somebody in that culture.

[33:54] Dr Matt Lodder So a lot of these traditional indigenous practices were wiped out or nearly wiped out by by colonialism. So the ones encountered first by colonial, colonial, you know, genocide, massacre. So tattooing practices in the Americas, particularly in Inuit populations, were almost wiped out by the late 1700s and recovering and learning about those histories has been very, very difficult. Um the practicesin the Pacific, for example in in New Zealand they were severely. urtailed by colonial um and colonization but um they did survive uh and they were they were sort of adequately and well documented and so come the kind of you know moment of real post-colonial energy in the late 1890s and onwards and new new generations of of artists have been been rediscovering and reinventing these practices and of course you know it's probably not a good idea with modern health laws and standards to be tattooing yourself or each other with cactus spines anymore. So these practices have adjusted and modernised in order to use modern inks and modern machines and modern tools or even where hand tools are used, replaceable needles made from metal. So these traditions aren't kind of cast in aspic. They are kind of changing and being updated by the practitioners who are using them. I think it's really interesting. I had a really interesting conversation with a Maori tattooer recently on my own podcast, Te Rangitu, who made this point, right? It's like just because that Maori culture gets to have a present as well as a past. You know, it doesn't we shouldn't kind of romanticize indigenous practices as being timeless. And so certainly with with kind of modern activism and modern revival movements, these practices are being updated and changed. But of course, the basic kind of magic and the basic kind of meanings are embedded in the practice. And actually, although it's important and these particular kind of pigments and tools have a kind of significance, they're not gettingany less authentic if they're doing it with a machine.

[36:29] Jane Perrone Absolutely. I mean, this is, I guess... It was always the case that presumably people getting a tattoo were influenced by things in their own country, but also things from far away. But now in the age of the Internet, I'm guessing that the speed of evolution of tattoo design, you know, you must get people coming into a tattoo studio saying, I've seen this Korean tattoo that I really like and want. How is that affecting the industry and the resulting tattoos?

[37:02] Dr Matt Lodder Yeah, I mean, I had a, so I've just written a book that's going to be coming out later this year. Hasn't got a finalised title yet, otherwise I'll be pitching it hard. But, you know, keep an eye on stuff for the book. And it's very difficult to talk about tattooing with any specific, like Western. When I talk about tattooing, I'm really, unless otherwise specified, talking about modern, Western, non-culturally normative tattooing, right? Of the kind that we see around us. So it's very difficult to talk about tattooing. after about 2000 because by that point, as in culture more generally, everything's already been invented. So there are you know prior to that period, prior to prior to 2000, we have more or less clearly identifiable trends and moments andindividuals or small groups of people who are influencing the industry. Post the internet, basically, everything is possible so there are you know again there are certainly trends and fashion, but it's so diffuse now, there are just incredible tattooers everywhere now in a way that just wasn't true and until fairly recently but it's much harder to kind of identify anything that's really kind of novel um stylistically or really kind of different in a in a way that a previous generation tattoos were different from what had gone before. Um, I mean, you mentioned career though, that, that should be said like at the moment, Korea is really interesting. Um, tattooing is illegal in Korea. Um, There was a court case in Japan that I was very, very tangentially involved with, which tried to make tattooing illegal in Japan, and that failed. The argument was tattooing is more like a medical practice because it's done with needles than it is an artistic practice and therefore should only be done by doctors.

[38:59] Dr Matt Lodder That argument failed in Japan, but the same argument went to the Supreme Court in Korea, and the decision went the other way. So in korea tattooing is officially a medical practice and to to be a to officially do tattooing in Korea you have to be a doctor and of course you know that is not the case. That said there's loads of incredible tattooers in Korea, they just sort of work, not exactly underground but sort of slightly kind of under the radar, and lots of them are moving to Europe and America and where it's easier to work and a lot of the tattooists from Korea are really working in this floral style. There's a kind of huge, I can't even name any individuals because there's so many huge really range oftattooers who are drawing on botanical illustration, for example, for their source material and producing incredible work. I mean actually that said, you know botanical illustration in terms of kind of designs have been source material for tattooers for a long time, literally cutting and sticking things out of out of encyclopedias and out of magazines , out of uh you know out of um sort of even adverts for plants, and using them as design books and so yeah that's nothing new either. But yeah lots of really nice interesting tattooers from Korea right now, although probably if anyone's listening wants to get a Korean tattoo I'd say like New York um or LA, like Koreatown in LA is probably the best place to get a good get a good tattoo from a korean without risking you know the the wrath of the korean authorities coming in kicking the door down.

[40:37] Music.

[40:46] Jane Perrone More from Matt shortly, but a quick info point during this break. I've had a few people asking me about Legends of the Leaf - getting hold of a copy in the US. I was disappointed - I mean that's an understatement - I was gutted that the publishers decided not to distribute the book in the US and North America more generally. And what I'm hoping to do is get the rights back to the book and be able to self-publish the book globally in the future. That hasn't happened yet, but as soon as it does happen, I'll let you know. In the meantime, if you are an American and you still don't have a copy and you fancy getting your hands on one, I can sell you a copy directly. If you do that, then you get your own words. If you want to give it as a gift or you want a special message put in there, I can do that for you. So get in touch with me direct if you want a copy of the book. Worth saying that the self-published version will not be quite the same as the original. It won't have the foiled cover and will probably be slightly less fancy, but it will have all the illustrations in it. So if you do want the original copy and you haven't got one yet whether you're in the UK or elsewhere actually I can sell you one directly, so get in touch if you want that to happen. I will sign it, I'll write in it, whatever you need me to do and I also tend to stick in the odd sneaky little postcard as well so you get an extra bonus for ordering direct from me. So just drop me a line if you're interested in that - and now back to planty tattoo chat.

[42:24] Music.

[42:30] Jane Perrone I also wanted just to ask, when you meet people, obviously going about your business and your research, you must see a lot of tattoos. When you were doing the Lindley Library talk, did you have any tattooed members of the audience who were like, hey, look at this?

[42:46] Matt Lodder Disappointingly, I didn't actually. I was really hoping there'd be lots of kind of like secretly tattooed kind of, you know, grand dame who had things hiding away. If there were any, they didn't show me any. I almost had the opposite problem. I was um so this one of the as I said one of the points I was always want to make about is what's going on underneath clothing and seeing as this is the the late night version of the podcast I can tell this story um I work uh one of the tattooers who's um who I write about a lot is a guy called Mr Sebastian who was the main tattooer to the sort of gay scene in London in the 80s and 90s. And a lot of his clients you were, you wouldn't know they were heavily tattooed if you saw them in their admittedly baggy 1980s but in their pants right they were completely not tattooed but under their underpants they would they were covered and I mean covered everywhere. And so I had a photo earlier in my talk to try and articulate this point in the most kind of, you know, interesting way possible - of a man who had a rose tattoo literally around his bum hole like around his sphincter and beautifully rendered detailed red and green rose because I thought this makes the point you know of like what's going on beneath clothing. And Isaid can i show can i show this in the RHS Lindley Library and they were like - no, you can't do that!

[44:13] Jane Perrone I mean, I have a practical question about this - surely that's the most sensitive part of your body?

[44:22] Matt Lodder Yeah, well, no, there are more sensitive parts, but he also tattoos those.

[44:27] Jane Perrone Do you have to be, uh, you know, I don't know, under, under sedation for these?

[44:34] Matt Lodder Well, I think there are rumours that he did occasionally use anaesthetic on his clients, but I think for a lot of his clients, thepain of it or the sensation of it, let's put it that way, was part of the process.

[44:49] Jane Perrone Right! That's amazing.

[44:49] Matt Lodder I was hoping that that discussion would reveal, you know, what was happening in the room but you know alas...

[45:00] Jane Perrone Wow, well I mean I guess if you're gonna have it have a tattoo somewhere then you know ...

[45:06] Matt Lodder For all of your listeners are like driving or like heading off to bed or having their dinner, I've really put them off, sorry!

[45:10] Jane Perrone Well Imean i just think that's fascinating, i just, the idea, my pain tolerance - I say this is somebody who has given birth to a child with no pain relief. I mean, yeah, I did pass out. But, you know, I should say that possibly I'm underestimating myself. But, well, that is fascinating. And so how do you know about this tattooist? If it was all very kind of, you know, how was that documented in the 80s and 90s?

[45:39] Matt Lodder He was a really amazing guy, he was an art teacher actually originally and um he quit being an art teacher to become a tattooer and a body piercer, he was also the first kind of real kind of professional body piercer in England, like one of the real pioneers of body piercing, um and yeah he was sort of known about, and people knew who he was he tattooed in Mount Pleasant in the middle of London, died in the early 90s. But I knew some people who he'd had tattooed. And I also knew through a friend of a friend, the person who had acquired his archive, if you like, all of his kind of portfolio photography. So I was able to go and have a word with that guy. And he let me photograph it all. And it's now actually, I managed to... That man Jeremy sadly passed away a couple of years ago. But on his death, he donated that collection to the Bishopsgate Institute, the kind of library of London life near Liverpool Street Station. So all of his stuff is in there. So if any of your listeners want to go and look at these, you can go and peruse his portfolio at your heart's content. Yeah, he's a subject of a chapter in my book as well. so you can read about him in the book um or uh or there was actually a separate book which is probably a bit hard to get hold of now with a lot of these photos in. I think his life's a really interesting example of a lot of the things I talk about, because a) he's this kind of middle-class guy in a way that hilariously the first time he shows up in the press it's as a customer of another tattooer and he's interviewed as part of an article who's kind of in the 1970s whose kind of argument is like "you're never guessing school teachers are getting tattooed now" right and like this is the guy in the interview. But he's a good illustration of all kinds of things so you know lots going on in these clothing he's very very educated, it's also a kind of community which I think is a really turns out and more of this in the next book is a really important part of tattooing's history both in the UK and in europe and in America, the kind of gay men, which isn't really documented, although people in the scene who've been around for a long time sort of know about it a bit. And yeah, it's a perfect illustration of you never know what's going on underneath clothing and it's beautiful and it's funny and it's weird and it's it's also an insight into the lives of people whose lives generally don't get talked about in this intimate detail, right, like as you said like who who are these men who in like 1990 you know early days of the HIV epidemic or early days of the kind of end of the HIV epidemic if you like, are getting like flowers tattooed on the most intimate parts of their bodies? Why are they doing that? What does that tell us about what we thought was happening in that period of time you know, a lot of the writing for example about that moment in time in London is very bleak and sad as it should be, but there's also this joy and humour and sex and you know these things that tattooing as I said you know and i will swear as well if you don't mind now - I always say the things people tattoo on their bodies are basically the things they love, the things they hate, and the things they want to fuck, and maybe the third one is a subcategory of the other two, right? And like that is really in many cases what tattooing is reducible to - it's true of art in general, right? It's like there's not a lot of complex - tattooers have tried to do kind of complex conceptual tattooing, but ultimately it's this very kind of base symbolic folk art which communicates extreme basic emotions of love, belief, faith, hope, fear, anger, sexuality, you know, all these sort of very, very basic underlying human emotions. And you know it's no surprise that they're they're kind of indexed in this way through tattooing.

[50:11] Jane Perrone Well i mean if we can get personal now, this brings us on to your own tattoos. Now i was going to ask you've got you can see you've got a rose on your neck so you've got some ... I mean for you tattooing must have a whole level of mindfulness in that it's your career, it's an academic interest, but it's also on your own body so tell me about that.

[50:30] Matt Lodder I mean it became, I sort of, people sort of say you know how did you how did you you as an artist or get interested in tattooing? It's the other way around, I started off interested in tattooing from very very young, and art history became a way of kind of articulating and thinking about all these things we've been talking about right? And so initially when i did my PhD and i hadn't done any art history before, I wanted to think about like what it meant to be an artwork in the world you know - what would it ... if tattooing is an art form like what what is the kind of consequences of thinking that way about yourself as an artwork? And 20 years on after starting that work i haven't quite got an answer to that question yet because it turns out that very basic question of like how is tattooing like art is quite complicated! You know we use that term 'body art' quite straightforwardly, it's been used for a very long time and again goes back to those Roman sources, they were talking about bodies that were 'de pictus sui pincto' you know sculpted and painted bodies. So these metaphors of art when it comes to marking the body are very very old but of course there are lots of things about tattooing which don't really fit with art right like we can't buy and sell it we can't hang it on the wall as you said it has this kind of durational limit people don't see it or experience it in the same way there's a if if tattooing is an art form like who is the artist is it the person on whose body it is and that's been the argument for a long time. Is it the person who does the tattoos? Is it some combination of them both? How does this fit as I go into the book as well into like legal arguments about copyright and ownership and creative genesis of ideas? It's very, very complicated.

[52:06] Matt Lodder So, you know, I started out with what I thought was quite an interesting set of questions a long time ago. And I'm still, you know, I'm still kind of excited to answer them and think about them every single day, which is a real treat. Um and yeah like you know I've got a lot of tattoos. So the roses again, they're very classic like um folk art designs because they also get to be the the duality of life - you get the petals and the thorns, you know every rose has its thorn, said the great um you know poet laureate Brett Michaels of Poison, you know, so again, those floral designs get to be kind of you you know, implicitly meaningful, even if you don't intend them to be. And they become kind of, you know, the vernacular language of tattooing in a really particular way. So I've got quite a few flowers, actually. I've got flowers on my hands or kind of representations of floral designs on my hands. I've got a vase of flowers. I'm going to strip now for the listeners. I've got a... I'll show you later on, I've got a vase of flowers up here. All kinds of little bits and pieces. Yeah, because, you know, they just work. They fill the space. They're gentle. And also, I'm a lover, not a fighter, right? I got the top of my head tattooed recently. I've grown my hair back since. But I went to Japan doing some research, putting out some really interesting designs from Japan from the turn of the 20th century, very interesting kind of culturally hybrid images of Western and Japanese designs. Designed um and i was gonna Iwas talking to a tattooer he was going to tattoo me and he was like i want to just do this on the top of your head and we're going to do this big eagle and i'm not tough enough to get a big eagle on top of my head, I'm you know I'm a soft-handed academic so i got a little I got a little uh uh chrysanthemum um and a little like a little sparrow um like coiled around the top of my head in a sort of crown shape so even you know the the the gentleness and the the kind of romance and the kindness of of of floral tattooing i i really like you know i have i've got some tougher tattoos as well i have got a a few more kind of you know more traditionally aggressive things on me but but you know as i said I'm a lover not a fighter right.

[54:23] Jane Perrone Well it's been a delight to talk to you Matt, I've learned absolutely loads and i'm sure so many listeners are going to have been absolutely mesmerized by this chat it's been really fascinating so thank you very much for joining me.

[54:34] Matt Lodder Thankyou so so much it's been a pleasure.

[54:35] Music.

[54:45] Jane Perrone Oh my days, I absolutely loved that chat with Dr. Matt Lodder. I highly recommend you read his book, Painted People. I'll stick a link in the show notes for that. And do check out his own podcast, Beneath the Skin. And there you'll find loads more fascinating information about the world of tattoos. As always, check out the show notes for the full transcript. and more and if you are a patreon subscriber at the legend or superfan level there is a chunk more chat that happened after we said goodbye and thank you uh there's about 10-15 minutes more chat where i talk about what i would have as a tattoo and matt explains the link to crufts and tattoos and yeah uh some more fascinating stuff so go and check that out if you're a patreon subscriber patreon is linked from the show notes it's patreon.com forward slash on the ledge I will see you soon for my bonus episode on William Robinson in the meantime I hope you and your plants are thriving bye.

[56:04] Music.

[56:21] Jane Perrone The music you heard in this episode was Roll Jordan Roll by The Joy Drops, The Road We Used to Travel When We Were Kids by Komiku and Whistle by Benjamin Banger. All Tracks are licenced under Creative Commons. Visit the show notes for details.

[56:37] Music.

Host Jane Perrone is joined by tattoo historian Dr Matt Lodder to learn about the role of plants in tattoos over the centuries in the third Late Night On The Ledge episode.

What is Late Night On The Ledge?

Imagine a late night TV chat show featuring your favourite guests, lots of chat, a dash of gossip and the odd rant - that’s what you’re getting when you tune into Late Night On The Ledge. This is the first of four Late Night OTL episodes which will run every two weeks until the end of August. Two will be audio-only, and two will offer video as well.

Please note: this episode features swearing and probably isn’t suitable for younger ears. If you need to find another episode to listen to, why not check out my themed back catalogue?

An announcement about On The Ledge

After nearly seven and a half years of pretty much continuous podcasting, I have decided to pause On The Ledge as of September 2024. I am working on a project that is going to take all my time between now and the year’s end, and I also want some headspace to think about the future direction of the show. The current plan is to come back sometime in December 2024. The last episode for the moment will be going out in early September, and will be On The Ledge episode 303, the last of my four Late Night OTL episodes. There will also be a bonus episode in between 302 and 303. If you have any questions please drop me a line to ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com.

This week’s guest

Dr Matt Lodder is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory, and Director of American Studies at the University of Essex. You can find Matt on Instagram at @mattlodder. He’s the host of Beneath the Skin podcast and the author of book Painted People. His new book Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art will be out in November 2024.

Please check these notes as you listen…

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