| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Lotteva Wagner Davis |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Industrial |
| Location | Plainview · Texas |
| Date | 1919 CE |
| Style / Technique | American hand-poke (hokey-pokey) traditional, circus-carnival era |
| Connected to | Gus Wagner, The Globetrotting Tattooed Man, Maud Wagner, Don Ed Hardy |
Archive Note
Lotteva Wagner was born March 12, 1910, in Los Angeles, California, into the traveling tattoo trade. Her father was Augustus "Gus" Wagner, a merchant seaman who had learned hand-poking from practitioners in Java and the Marquesas Islands. Her mother was Maud Stevens Wagner, the aerialist and contortionist who met Gus at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and became the first widely documented female professional tattooer in the United States. An older sister, Sarah Jane, born 1908 in Chase County, Kansas, died shortly after birth, so Lotteva grew up an only child on the circus and carnival roads of the American West.
In 1919, at nine years old, she began hand-poking tattoos under her father's supervision. That is the method she kept. Like both parents, she refused the electric tattoo machine that had become the trade standard after Samuel O'Reilly's 1891 patent. The hand-poking method binds a needle or needle cluster to a wooden holder, dips it in pigment, and presses it into the skin by hand. It is slow and demands precision. She also learned sign and banner painting in those years, lettering carnival panels with scrollwork and script, and worked briefly as a circus clown.
The strangest fact of her life is that she carried no tattoos at all. In a trade where circus tattooers were expected to wear heavy work as advertisement, Lotteva had completely bare skin. By the account in Alan Govenar's biography, the restriction started with her mother. Maud, herself heavily tattooed, forbade Gus from marking their daughter during childhood. Maud relented after Gus died in 1941, but by then Lotteva had made her own vow. If her father could not tattoo her, no one would. She held to it until she died.
Gus died in 1941, and on May 21 that same year Lotteva married Russell Eugene "Tarzan" Davis in El Dorado, Butler County, Kansas. Davis was an amusement ride operator and sign painter, and the two combined their trades. From 1941 to 1980 they traveled Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, running carnival rides, painting commercial signs, and restoring antique wooden carousel horses. The 1940 census had already listed Lotteva living with her mother Maud in Homestead Township, Chase County, Kansas, working as a painter and artist.
In 1983 she performed her last tattoo. The recipient was Don Ed Hardy, the artist who did more than anyone to bring Japanese aesthetics into American tattooing. The design was a traditional rose, applied with her hand-poking tools. The moment reads as a handoff, from the early twentieth-century carnival hand-poke line of the Wagners to the academic, global style Hardy was building. That single thread, Gus to Maud to Lotteva to Hardy, is one of the longest unbroken non-machine American tattooing lines of the century.
The couple settled permanently in Plainview, Hale County, Texas, where Lotteva turned to oil painting of Western scenes and carousel restoration. In 1989 the National Tattoo Association honored her for her life's work at its annual convention. She died December 29, 1993, in Plainview, and was buried in Plainview Cemetery. A note on the record: several web sources and genealogy forums name her as the daughter of the Bowery machine pioneer Charlie Wagner, and some report her death in 1983. Census records from 1920, 1930, and 1940 and Texas death records correct both. The shared surname is a coincidence, and she outlived the rose tattoo by a decade. Schiffer Publishing released Govenar's biography of her in September 2025, the third volume in his series Last of the Hand Tattoo Artists.