Archive Note
Ridler was a former British Army officer who reached the rank of acting major in the Machine Gun Corps and saw service in the First World War. From 1927 he visited the London tattooist George Burchett with a plan to become the world's most striking tattooed attraction, and over a period sources place between 1927 and 1934 Burchett applied wide curved black zebra-like stripes over his whole body to cover earlier, cruder tattoos; he completed the transformation with stretched ear and septum piercings and filed teeth. Performing as The Great Omi, he and his wife, who performed as Omette, toured England and France and then North America, appearing at the 1939 New York World's Fair, at Ripley's Odditorium, and with the Ringling Brothers circus, before retiring in the early 1950s. He was a tattooed performer and subject, not a tattooer, and the story that he was captured and forcibly tattooed in New Guinea was a stage fabrication.
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