| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Mildred "Millie" Hull |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Early Modern |
| Location | 16 Bowery · Chatham Square, New York City |
| Date | 1939 CE |
| Style / Technique | Bowery American traditional, bold-line nautical and pin-up flash in the Charlie Wagner Chatham Square idiom |
| Connected to | Charlie Wagner, Samuel O'Reilly, Maud Wagner |
Archive Note
Mildred Hull was born in New York in 1897 and got out of school early. She joined the traveling shows in her teens, dancing burlesque and showing off her body as a tattooed attraction in carnivals. That was the standard arc for a tattooed woman of her generation, the midway and nothing past it. Hull went the other way.
The man who covered her was Charlie Wagner, the King of the Bowery Tattooers, working out of 11 Chatham Square. Wagner had inherited that shop and the trade from Samuel O'Reilly, who patented the first electric tattoo machine, and he held his own coil-machine patent from 1904. Wagner put more than three hundred tattoos on Hull through the mid-1920s. A painting by Ace Harlyn of Wagner tattooing Hull is the image that still carries their working relationship, and it hung in the New-York Historical Society's Tattooed New York show in 2017.
Hull did not stay a canvas. She learned the trade from Wagner and went to work as a tattooist herself, the rare woman of her era who crossed from being looked at to doing the looking. Where Nora Hildebrandt, Artoria Gibbons, and Betty Broadbent stayed exhibits on the circus midway for decades, Hull stepped off the stage and into the shop.
Around 1939 she opened her own room, the Tattoo Emporium, in the back of a barbershop at 16 Bowery in Lower Manhattan. Barbershop in front, tattoo room in back, the standard Bowery setup where tattooers split the rent and the foot traffic with the business next door. She ran it a few blocks south of Wagner's Chatham Square anchor, in the same Lower Manhattan cluster that held Lew Alberts and the Moskowitz family. The trade called her the Queen of the Bowery, and she held that room until the end.
Her reach went past the Bowery. In 1936 she landed on the cover of Family Circle, a domestic women's magazine that ran Hollywood ingenues and home-economics types, not tattooed working-class women. A tattooed woman on that cover was a small shock, an early crack in the wall between marked bodies and mainstream feminine respectability. She was solid enough in the trade by the early 1930s that Albert Parry named her in Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art, the canonical pre-war tattoo book, as one of the principal Bowery interview subjects alongside Wagner and Lew Alberts.
Hull died in August 1947 in New York, around fifty years old, reportedly by suicide, poison taken in a Bowery restaurant. The year and the cause are steady across the record. She did not live to see the 1961 city ban that drove the Bowery trade underground.
Her mark is the storefront and the crossing. Maud Wagner came earlier as the first documented American woman to tattoo, but she worked the traveling shows and never ran a permanent shop. Hull planted herself at one address on the Bowery, the center of American tattooing, and held the chair as a working tattooist instead of an attraction. That is why she is remembered as a hinge between the sideshow tattooed lady and the woman who runs the shop.