Maud Wagner

Forest Park · Saint Louis World's Fair

Maud Stevens Wagner (1877 to 1961) was the first widely documented female tattoo artist in the United States, a traveling-circus aerialist who learned the trade from the tattooer Gus Wagner after meeting him at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. She worked the hand-poke method for the rest of her career.

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Born in Emporia, Kansas, Maud Stevens left to work the traveling-circus circuit as an aerialist and contortionist. At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition she met Gus Wagner, a heavily tattooed merchant seaman who had learned hand-poke work abroad, and traded a date for a tattooing lesson; the two married on 3 October 1904. They were among the last working American tattooers to operate entirely by hand, refusing the electric machine, and toured vaudeville houses, county fairs, and amusement arcades, carrying tattooing inland from the port cities. The canonical image of her is a 1907 portrait taken at The Plaza Gallery in Los Angeles, now held at the Library of Congress and one of the most reproduced photographs in American tattoo history. Their daughter Lotteva began tattooing at age nine and continued the family hand-poke line until 1983, when her last tattoo was a rose she gave to Don Ed Hardy. Maud died of cancer in 1961 at Lotteva's home in Lawton, Oklahoma.

Lineage

her husband and the tattooer she learned the trade from; they toured as a husband and wife team Gus Wagner, The Globetrotting Tattooed Man 1872 CE · Person