Tattoo You
The ties between tattooing and the maritime services run more than skin deep; today, the popularity of tattoos has spread to servicemembers other than sailors - and people of all ages.
By Molly Wyman

"I selected an enormous Marine Corps emblem to be tattooed across my chest. It required several sittings and hurt me like the devil, but the finished product was worth the pain. I blazed triumphantly forth, a Marine from throat to waist. The emblem is still with me. Nothing on earth but skinning will remove it."

- Maj. Gen. Smedly Darlington Butler, USMC, describing his antics in the Philippines in 1899 as a lieutenant

The 70-year-old Navy veteran who showed up at C.W. Eldridge's tattoo shop in Berkeley, Calif., recently was on a mission. He needed a tattoo, the old sailor told Eldridge. He could not die without one. Eldridge understood the sentiment and was happy to oblige.

An hour later, the Navy veteran left the shop with a tattoo of his family crest on his upper arm and feeling like "more of a sailor," Eldridge recalls.

The customer reminded Eldridge of a time when sailors and tattoos were synonymous. "Back in the '70s," he recalls, when he worked at the aptly named Fleet tattoo studio in San Francisco, he saw "servicemen almost every day." Eldridge himself had just retired after a four-year stint in the Navy and had gotten his first tattoos in various Pacific ports.

"That feeling has watered down a little bit," Eldridge says, as tattoos have become more widespread in the general population and bases in the Bay area have closed. "But it's still there - especially in the Navy."

A maritime tradition

Samuel O'Reilly, a New York City tattoo artist who patented the first electric tattooing implement in 1891, once said "a sailor without a tattoo is like a ship without grog: not seaworthy." That sentiment might be an exaggeration, but the ties between tattooing and the maritime services run more than skin deep.

This close identification between sailors and tattooing "goes back to Captain Cook's days," says Eldridge, who operates the Tattoo Archive (which is available via moaa's links page, www.moaa.org /magazine/links.asp) and publishes the quarterly tattoo newsletter The Archive File. The word tattoo was introduced into the English language from Tahiti, where it was first recorded by James Cook's expeditions in 1769.

Although virtually every human culture has at one point or another used some sort of permanent skin decoration - in Europe the Vikings had tattoos - sailors returning from Polynesia with souvenirs inked permanently into their skin "rekindled an interest that had been dormant for centuries" in modern Europe, Eldridge explains. According to "Skin Deep: The Art of the Tattoo," a 1999 exhibit at The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va., 18 of the 25 mutineers on hms Bounty - including ringleader Fletcher Christian - had at least one tattoo.

For almost as long, tattoos have been part of the American maritime tradition. According to Stephen R. Gilbert's The Tattoo History Source Book (Juno Books, 2001), "the earliest written records of American tattooing are found in ships' logs, letters, and diaries written by seamen during the early part of the 19th century." Moby-Dick author Herman Melville describes in his memoirs the tattoos - or "pricking" - he saw aboard a Navy ship in the 1840s. The Mariners' Museum cites estimates that "by the end of the 19th century 90 percent of all sailors in the U.S. Navy had tattoos."

'Sailors just seem to get tattoos'

The tradition continues today. Lt. Cmdr. Ed Swift, USCG-Ret., says he got his first tattoo as a petty officer third class while serving under the "fine tutelage" of four chief petty officers, "the saltiest guys I had ever met in my young career." While attending school in Yorktown, Va., he visited a tattoo parlor in Washington, D.C., and chose a design - an eagle - from among the tattoos displayed on the walls.

That eagle was the first of what has become a collection of nine tattoos. Swift no longer picks designs off the wall; he once attended art college and now says, "I think I'll always design my own." His most recent - which he got after retiring from the Coast Guard - is a rearing mustang wearing a Coast Guard blanket.

"I wasn't the typical officer; it was kind of making a statement," he explains. The mustang is a reference to Swift's 30-year career: He was enlisted for 13 years and served another eight as a warrant officer, eventually retiring as a lieutenant commander.

Many tattooed officers entered military service as enlisted personnel. Unlike today when, as Swift puts it, "almost everyone you see has got a tattoo," when he got his first in 1973, tattoos were "a darker kind of thing ... more unsavory." Although Swift is quick to add, "I looked at it more in the maritime tradition. A lot of the people I respected, especially senior enlisted folks, had tattoos. ... Sailors just seem to get tattoos."

Swift's children have followed in his footsteps. His older son served for 10 years in the Coast Guard and has nine tattoos; his younger son was in the Navy for six years and has seven tattoos. Swift says his wife, after 31 years of marriage, "might as well have been in the military herself," although she lags behind as far as tattoos go, with only three. (Her first tattoo was a 40th-birthday gift from her older son, who said, "Mom, you're the only one without a tattoo - we're going to take care of that.")

Not just for sailors anymore

In recent years tattoos have become more mainstream: As many as one in 10 Americans now are believed to have a tattoo, according to the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center. An increasing number of servicemembers other than sailors have elected to go under the needle. This isn't an entirely new phenomenon: Eldridge was first exposed to tattoos thanks to his father, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

Army Maj. Patrick Budjenska has three tattoos; one is related to his military service. The Airborne insignia, decorated with a red beret - the distinctive headgear of Army Airborne - adorns his upper arm. He acquired this tattoo when he was a newly qualified Airborne lieutenant.

"I got it at Officers Basic Course - a lot of guys were getting them, and I got one too," Budjenska says. He believes that those officers who get tattoos most likely did so to mark "the completion of a very hard, somewhat prestigious training event."

Like Swift, Budjenska was an enlisted servicemember before becoming an officer. "It is less surprising to me that an officer who had prior service in an enlisted capacity" might have a few tattoos, he says. "I don't think it's as strictly taboo [as it once was] for officers to have them." But, he adds, "I think you will find very few officers with visible tattoos."

Thus far, "nobody has ever really raised their eyebrows" about his own skin art, Budjenska says. Although Budjenska doesn't see many colonels with tattoos - mostly "majors, a couple of captains" - he believes in 10 years that will change. "Most every friend who was a lieutenant with me has some sort of art," he says.

Taking It Off

Unlike official decorations, which come off when the uniform does, a tattoo remains with its wearer for life. But thanks to advances in laser surgery, servicemembers can choose to have their tattoos removed. In 2000, Walter Reed Army Medical Center dermatology service opened a laser center that treats active duty personnel looking to remove unwanted skin art. The naval medical centers in San Diego and Portsmouth, Va., have similar facilities, as do two Air Force facilities.

As legendary Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedly Darlington Butler reminds us, "nothing on earth but skinning will remove" a tattoo - skinning and laser surgery.