Archive Note
Following an established tradition among Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, Stubbe received tattoos depicting scenes from the Crucifixion and Resurrection and a Jerusalem Cross, the standard iconographic vocabulary of Jerusalem pilgrim tattooing. His forearms were recorded in a 1676 engraving, and the case entered wider European print culture through Johann Lund's Die alten juedischen Heiligthuemer (Hamburg, 1738). The case matters for three reasons: it is a precisely dated, engraving-documented instance of European Christian tattooing; it confirms that an organized professional tattoo trade for European pilgrims was operating in Jerusalem by the mid-seventeenth century; and it predates the Cook and Banks Pacific encounter of 1769 by exactly one hundred years. The work almost certainly took place at the trade that became the Razzouk family's Jerusalem operation, and the Jerusalem Cross on Stubbe's forearms matches the patterns still applied by Wassim Razzouk at the same Old City shop today.