Bodies of Subversion featured in Emma Beddington’s The Guardian article on women and tattoos!
“Shock of the old: 10 trailblazing and transgressive tattooed ladies”
“Unpicking the truth about 19th- and early-20th-century western women’s tattoos is tricky, too. Tattooed ladies in circuses needed a good origin story; the more lurid, the better. Tales of frontier capture and kidnap were wildly popular. Nora Hildebrandt maintained her father was forced to tattoo her while they were being held by Sitting Bull. Some stories were even more out-there: Laura Laramie, a tattooed lady in Baltimore, reported giving birth to an identically tattooed baby, according to Margot Mifflin’s fascinating history of women’s tattoos, Bodies of Subversion.”
Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, 3rd Ed.
Read the full article HERE