Archive Note
Born in Leeds, Macdonald served in the Royal Engineers and saw action in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, then by his own account began tattooing around 1882, initially among soldiers at the Aldershot garrison. By 1889 he was working from the London Hammam at 76 Jermyn Street in St James's, the center of fashionable male London, which let him present tattooing as a refined commission rather than a dockside trade. In 1894 the Post Office London Directory created a category to list him under the title "tattooist," the earliest surviving British commercial-directory use, and the same year he was granted British Patent No. 3035 for an electric tattooing machine, the first confirmed British tattoo-machine patent. He built a largely upper-class clientele and was called "the Michelangelo of tattooing" in the French press. He is popularly said to have tattooed several European royals, but most of those specific names are thinly supported and some are mistaken.