| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Lady Viola |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Early Modern |
| Location | Covington · Kentucky |
| Date | 1922 CE |
| Style / Technique | early twentieth century American sideshow tattooed-lady portrait suit |
| Connected to | Betty Broadbent, Mildred "Millie" Hull, Maud Wagner |
Archive Note
Ethel Martin was born March 27, 1898, in Covington, Kentucky, to Charles Robert Martin and Flora Alice Walker. She took the surname Vangi from her husband, the Italian-born Vincenzo Vangi, and performed under the stage name Lady Viola. By her own era's account she entered the trade and was tattooed to support herself and her child, the standard economic path into the tattooed-woman profession in the early twentieth century, when a displayed body could earn a woman a living wage the rest of the labor market would not.
The work that made her was done by Frank Graf, a Bowery, Coney Island, and Brooklyn tattooer known for detailed portrait work, in the 1920s. Period accounts have her living with the Graf household for several weeks while the suit was completed. Graf covered her in portraits. United States presidents went across her chest, with Washington, Lincoln, and Wilson named; the faces of Charlie Chaplin and Tom Mix sat in floral designs; the United States Capitol ran across her back; the Statue of Liberty and a Rock of Ages went on her legs. A 1930 account put the full suit at about 485 dollars, a single period figure.
On that work she was billed as "the Most Beautiful Tattooed Woman," a marketing line typical of the tattooed-lady acts of the period. She is recorded here as an attraction, a tattooed woman who was displayed, not as a tattooer. That distinction is the spine of her story and worth holding to.
The career ran on the two-season rhythm of the trade. Summers she traveled the outdoor circuit with circuses, including the Ringling Brothers circus, documented for 1932. Winters she worked indoor dime museums, among them Gorman's in Philadelphia in the 1930s, with cold-weather stands that reached St. Louis. Her 1977 Asbury Park Press obituary, a primary source, bills her as the "world's most completely tattooed lady" with 365 tattoos, says she toured foreign countries, and records that she appeared in movies and at the 1939 World's Fair.
The newspaper record is what carries her. Her federal census occupation reads as domestic, blank in 1940 and "Keeping House" in 1950, with the 1950 household placed in Manalapan, New Jersey. So the Ringling Brothers season and the wider sideshow life rest on the press, primarily that obituary, rather than on any census or vital record. The show-business run lasted decades. She was still working as an attraction with the Thomas Joyland Show at the age of seventy three. Like several female attractions of her generation she also did a little tattooing in the winter dime-museum months, but that is a footnote to her billing, not the basis of it.
She died on April 25, 1977, at the Fulton County Medical Center in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, having moved late in life to Needmore, Pennsylvania. The date carries a small snag worth naming. The Asbury Park Press obituary of April 27, 1977 says she died Monday, which fixes April 25; the Social Security Death Index and Find A Grave show April 15, read in the vault as a 15-for-25 indexing slip. The obituary date leads. Her children were Rose Boyce, Blanche Dailey, Eva Stern, Vito, Frank, and Vincent.
What survives of Lady Viola is the suit and the billing. She sat for weeks under Frank Graf's hand, then carried his portrait work across the country for half a century, a Kentucky woman turned into a moving gallery of presidents and movie stars, still drawing a crowd at seventy three.