When I was in college I went through a phase where I really wanted a Winnie the Pooh tattoo on my hip. I should say that I went to college in the 90’s, when having a tattoo kind of made you a rebel, and I liked the idea of a Winnie the Pooh one because it was sweet but still kind of badass. Cue the “Back in My Day” soundtrack of Alanis Morisette and the Indigo Girls! Now, of course, tattoos are much more common, and I kind of feel like a rebel for not having one (my dad ixnayed the Winnie the Pooh idea, much to my chagrin at the time).
Anyway, I saw a comment on the social webs somewhere recently asking whether the Tudors were tattooed. People took guesses, many of them saying that they likely would have died of the infection if they had been. I immediately wondered about that – after all, many ancient pre-antibiotic cultures incorporated tattoos into the religious and cultural fabric of their societies.
So how about the Tudors? Did the Tudors have tattoos?
First, let’s go back 12,000 years. Tools specifically used for tattooing have been found in archeological sites in France, Portugal, and even the northern climes of Scandinavia. One mummified man, Otzi the Iceman, whose 5,300 year old remains were found in a glacier in the Italian Alps, had 61 tattoos. That’s a lot of ink!
The ancient celts in Britain were no less inked. In fact, the actual word Britain might come from a tattoo. In the Gallic wars, Caesar wrote: “All the Britons dye themselves with woad, which produces a blue colour, and makes their appearance in battle more terrible.” They were known throughout Europe as the Pretani, a Celtic word meaning the ‘painted’ or the ‘tattooed’ ones. From this Pretani word, we get the modern word Britain.
In the third century AD Gaius Julius Solinus, the chronicler and author of De mirabilibus mundi (The Wonders of the World) wrote that the inhabitants of Britain liked “flesh embroidery.” He says, “that region is partly held by barbarians who from childhood have different pictures of animals skillfully implanted on their bodies so that as the man grows, so grow the marks painted on him. There is nothing more that they consider as a test of patience than to have their limbs soak up the maximum amount of dye through these permanent scars.”
Eight hundred years later William of Malmesbury wrote about the Battle of Hastings. The British, he says, had shaved heads, and were covered in tattoos. He also wrote that many Normans adopted this new idea, and got tattoos themselves.
But it didn’t really take off until Martin Frobisher. In 1576 he began exploring the New World, and he found that tattooing was common in Native America in all the places he visited, along the entire eastern coast from Canada to Florida. In 1577 he brought back three Inuit hostages to show them off across England.
Drawings from the artist John White distinctly show the tattoos on the natives:
They arrived in Bristol, and Frobisher commissioned John White to paint both the portraits of the Inuit’s as well as a series of the ancient picts, comparing the two and showing how similar they were. Above is an image of one of the Native Americans. And here is an image of a Pictish warrior:
These images were created to show that the people who had been brought over were not so very different than the English.
The visitors, and the paintings, sparked a new interest in tattooing in Europe in the 16th century. One of the first instances of tattooing as a mark of an event was when a European would take a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and get a tattoo in Jerusalem. In fact, the same family has run a traditional tattoo shop in Jerusalem for over 500 years.
As time went on and more explorers found lands and people with ink, the practice grew. Some people give traditional credit to James Cook and his voyage, and the word itself, tattoo, is actually from the South Pacific. But tattooing was more common than one might imagine in England in the pre-Conquest era, and took off again in the Elizabethan period!
Want more Tudor in your life? Join the Tudor Learning Circle - the only social network devoted solely to Tudor History. Sign up free at TudorLearningCircle.com! And why not Tudorfy your YouTube algorithm by getting exclusive videos and content on Heather's YouTube channel!
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.