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Journal article
Jack Tar's ink: a comparative analysis of Euro-American and West African sailors' tattoos during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries
Maritime studies, Vol.22(1), 3
03/2023
Web of Science ID: WOS:000899878700001
Abstract
Sailors have commonly been identified as a heavily tattooed community, even since the eighteenth century. Euro-American sailors left some of the most detailed records we have on maritime tattoos. Yet their non-Western counterparts have often been neglected in analysis of how and why sailors tattooed themselves. This article compares tattoos of the Kru or Krumen from Sierra Leone and Liberia to that of Euro-American sailors. Both groups of mariners had difficult lives with physically demanding jobs that separated them from landed communities. In both cases, tattoos reflected the colonial world; for Euro-American sailors, tattoos signaled their time spent in exotic locations, and for Kru sailors, tattoos helped them avoid colonial exploitation and the slave trade. In both cases, tattoos were a way for sailors to differentiate themselves in a world where their bodies were exploited as disposable labor sources. They helped the wearer avoid becoming embodied property of another person, through enslavement, indenture, or conscription. And indeed, both forms of tattoos were successful in marking the wearer apart from other populations who were exploited in those ways. Ultimately, the story of how and why sailors from many different cultures acquired tattoos is intricately entangled with the larger stories of imperialism and labor in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
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Details
- Title
- Jack Tar's ink
- Publication Details
- Maritime studies, Vol.22(1), 3
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publisher
- Springer Nature
- Number of pages
- 7
- Copyright
- © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature
- Identifiers
- WOS:000899878700001; 99381852696806600
- Academic Unit
- History and Philosophy; College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities
- Language
- English