For roughly two decades around 1900, tattooing became briefly fashionable among the British upper classes, and the craze spread across Europe and into wealthy American society. The fashion ran on royal example. The future Edward VII had received a Jerusalem cross from the Razzouk family during his 1862 Holy Land tour, and his sons, including the future George V, were tattooed in Japan in 1881, giving the practice a glamour that drew in aristocrats and society women. London tattooers built respectable, by-appointment studios to serve them: Sutherland Macdonald opened Britain's first professional studio in the West End in the 1890s, and Tom Riley worked the same fashionable market. The electric tattoo machine, newly available, made the work faster and cleaner. The fad faded by the First World War, but it permanently changed how tattooing could be presented. This page runs in parallel to the tattooed-attraction tradition of the sideshow and cross-links the Razzouk pilgrimage tattoo lineage.

What was the Victorian and Edwardian tattoo fad?

The Victorian and Edwardian tattoo fad was a brief vogue for tattooing among the British and European upper classes, running roughly from the 1880s to the early 1900s. During this period tattooing, long associated with sailors and the working poor, became a fashionable accessory for aristocrats, military officers, and society women, encouraged by reports that European royalty had been tattooed. The fashion supported a small number of high-end London tattoo studios that presented the craft as a refined applied art rather than a dockside trade.

Did Edward VII have a tattoo?

Yes. Albert Edward, then Prince of Wales and the future Edward VII, was tattooed with a Jerusalem cross by the Razzouk family in Jerusalem in 1862, during his Holy Land tour, not in Japan as some accounts claim (see the Razzouk pilgrimage tradition). His example, as the most fashionable man in Britain, did more than anything else to make tattooing acceptable in elite circles. The separate and frequently confused royal tattoo event came in 1881, when his sons received tattoos in Japan.

Who got a dragon tattoo in Japan in 1881?

The future George V, then Prince George, received a tattoo in Japan in 1881 while serving as a young naval officer aboard HMS Bacchante, along with his brother Prince Albert Victor. The famous dragon associated with George was applied by a Japanese tattooist during a Yokohama port call. This 1881 Japan event is distinct from his grandfather Edward VII's 1862 Jerusalem tattoo, and the two are routinely and wrongly merged in popular accounts.

Who opened Britain's first professional tattoo studio?

Sutherland Macdonald (1860 to 1942) is generally recognized as the operator of Britain's first openly professional, fixed-address tattoo studio, working from inside the London Hammam at 76 Jermyn Street in St James's. He was the first person listed under the trade-category "Tattooist" in the 1894 Post Office London Directory, a category created at his request, and he held British Patent No. 3035 of 1894 for an electric tattooing machine, the first British electric-tattoo-machine patent on record. His chief London rival in the same fashionable market was Tom Riley.

How the fad worked

The royal spark

Two royal tattoo events of the nineteenth century gave the fashion its glamour, and they are constantly confused, so they are kept distinct here.

The first and earlier event: in 1862, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, was tattooed with a Jerusalem cross by the Razzouk family during his tour of the Holy Land. The Razzouks were, and remain, the Coptic Christian pilgrimage tattooers of Jerusalem (see Razzouk pilgrimage tattoo tradition). Because the Prince of Wales set the standard for fashionable male conduct in Britain, his tattoo, even a modest pilgrimage mark, gave the practice a respectability it had never had in elite society.

The second event, two decades later: in 1881, the Prince's sons, the future George V and his brother Prince Albert Victor, were tattooed in Japan while serving as naval cadets aboard HMS Bacchante. George's dragon, applied by a Japanese practitioner at Yokohama, became the most famous single tattoo of the craze. A later, separate piece is sometimes attributed to George from a London tattooer, but the documented Japan dragon is the 1881 work.

Together these events, the 1862 Jerusalem cross and the 1881 Japan tattoos, told fashionable Britain that tattooing was something princes did. The craze followed.

The respectable studio: Sutherland Macdonald

The fad needed somewhere respectable to be served, and Sutherland Macdonald built it. Born in Leeds in 1860, Macdonald picked up tattooing during British Army service and began working professionally around 1882 in the garrison town of Aldershot. By 1888 to 1889 he had set up inside the London Hammam, a Turkish bath at 76 Jermyn Street in the heart of upper-class male London, surrounded by the gentlemen's clubs, bespoke tailors, and hotels of St James's.

Macdonald deliberately positioned tattooing as a refined commission. He wore a white coat like a surgeon, charged in guineas rather than shillings, worked by appointment, and registered his trade in the Post Office Directory. The 1894 directory listed him under a brand-new trade-category, "Tattooist," a word he claimed to have established as a professional self-description. That listing is the strongest single piece of evidence for his foundational status as Britain's first publicly identifiable professional tattooist. He worked in a wide range, from heraldic crests and hunting scenes to Japanese-style dragons, and according to a profile in The Strand Magazine in April 1897 he used Japanese hand-tools for shading alongside his machine.

The electric machine

The fad coincided with a technological shift. The American tattooer Samuel O'Reilly patented an electric rotary tattoo machine in the United States in December 1891 (Patent No. 464,801), the first such device on the patent record. Macdonald followed with British Patent No. 3035 of 1894 for an electric tattooing apparatus, the first British electric-tattoo-machine patent. The machine mattered to the fad because it made tattooing faster, cleaner, and less painful than the slow hand methods, which suited a fashionable clientele that wanted refinement rather than the rough experience of a dockside parlour. Whether Macdonald's design improved on O'Reilly's or simply transposed the principle into a British filing is a question modern historians have not settled.

Tom Riley and the London market

Macdonald's principal London competitor was Tom Riley (about 1870 to 1929), who worked the same fashionable West End market in the 1890s and 1900s and was, like Macdonald, part of the network of tattooers serving the craze. Riley and Macdonald together dominated high-end London tattooing during the fad's peak. The next generation produced George Burchett (1872 to 1953), later styled the "King of Tattooists," whose posthumous and unreliable 1958 memoir claimed he had trained under both Riley and Macdonald.

Spread beyond Britain

The fashion was not only British. Wealthy clients across Europe and in the United States took it up, and a similar tattooed-royalty literature attached to figures across the Continent. The same Japanese tattooers who had marked the British princes, centered on Yokohama, served other European royal and aristocratic clients in the 1880s and 1890s, so that a fashionable European might get a Japanese dragon from a Yokohama master or a heraldic crest from Macdonald's Jermyn Street studio as two ends of the same vogue.

The decline

The fad faded in the years around the First World War. As the novelty wore off and tattooing once again became associated with soldiers and sailors during the war years, the upper-class fashion receded. Macdonald kept working into the 1930s, by which point British tattooing had shifted back toward the seaside-resort and sailor markets. He died in 1942. The brief moment when an aristocrat might casually display a tattoo had passed, but the idea that tattooing could be a respectable, commissioned, custom art, established in Macdonald's Jermyn Street studio, would resurface decades later in the fine-art tattoo movements of the late twentieth century.

Significance

The Victorian and Edwardian fad is the moment tattooing first broke out of its working-class and maritime associations in the West, even if only briefly and only at the top of society. It produced the first openly professional, by-appointment, hygienic tattoo studio model in Britain, the prototype for the modern tattoo "parlour." It generated the first British electric-tattoo-machine patent. And it established a template, custom-designed, commissioned tattooing presented as fine art, that anticipated the studio culture of the modern revival by most of a century.

The fad also shows how royal example shapes fashion. The careful separation of the 1862 Jerusalem event from the 1881 Japan event is not pedantry: the two together, a pilgrimage cross and a Japanese dragon, are the precise mechanism by which an ancient sailor's practice became, for a generation, the height of fashion.

Documented fact versus legend

The fad is heavily mythologized, especially around its royal clients, so the tiers matter.

VERIFIED: Edward VII's 1862 Jerusalem cross from the Razzouks; the 1881 Japan tattoos of the future George V and Prince Albert Victor aboard HMS Bacchante; Sutherland Macdonald's 1894 Post Office London Directory listing under "Tattooist"; his British Patent No. 3035 of 1894; Tom Riley as his principal London rival; the use of the electric machine.

REFUTED: "Edward VII was tattooed in Japan." He was tattooed in Jerusalem in 1862; the Japan event two decades later involved his sons, not him.

SINGLE-SOURCE / UNVERIFIED: most named attributions of specific royals to specific London tattooers. The royal-client lists of the period rest heavily on a single 1898 article ("Tattooed Royalty" by R. J. Stephens) and on Burchett's unreliable 1958 memoir. That Macdonald and Riley served an aristocratic clientele in general is well supported, including by Macdonald's own 1889 newspaper interview; that a particular named royal was tattooed by a particular named artist usually is not.

DISPUTED: whether the future George V received additional tattoo work from Macdonald in London. His documented dragon is the 1881 Japan work; a later London piece is plausible but not confirmed by a primary source naming the artist. The claim that Burchett formally apprenticed under Macdonald and Riley is also disputed, resting on the unreliable memoir.

Cultural-context note

This was a fashion of the powerful, and it is worth being clear about what it borrowed. The craze drew its glamour partly from Japanese tattooing and from the Christian pilgrimage tradition of Jerusalem, both of which had deep histories of their own that the fad treated mainly as exotic style. The same upper-class society that found a Japanese dragon fashionable on a prince's arm generally despised the same tattoo on a sailor. The fad's respectability was a function of who wore the mark, not of the mark itself, which is the through-line connecting it to the sideshow tradition and to tattoo history more broadly.

Cross-references

  • Razzouk pilgrimage tattoo tradition: the Jerusalem Coptic pilgrimage tattooers who gave Edward VII his 1862 cross.
  • The tattooed-attraction tradition: the working-class sideshow economy of tattooed performers, the mirror image of the upper-class fad in the same decades.
  • Maud Wagner: the American hand-poke tattooist of the same era, on the opposite end of the social scale from the Jermyn Street clientele.
  • Martin Hildebrandt: the first permanent American professional tattooer, the New York counterpart to the London studio model.

Sources

  • Lodder, Matt. "Macdonald, Sutherland (1860 to 1942)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2016. The peer-reviewed reference biography.
  • Lodder, Matt. Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art. Yale University Press, 2024. Extended treatment of Macdonald and the Edwardian fashionable-tattoo period.
  • Bolton, Gambier. "Pictures on the Human Skin." The Strand Magazine, vol. 13, no. 76, April 1897. Period profile of Macdonald documenting his hybrid machine-and-Japanese-tool method.
  • Post Office London Directory (Kelly's), 1894 edition. The first listing under the trade-category "Tattooist," Macdonald's entry.
  • UK Patent Office. British Patent No. 3035 of 1894, granted to Sutherland Macdonald for an electric tattooing apparatus.
  • Gilbert, Steve. Tattoo History: A Source Book. Juno Books, 2000. Period-source anthology covering the British and European parlour era.
  • DeMello, Margo. Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community. Duke University Press, 2000. Cultural-historical anchor for the 1890s to 1900s fashionable-tattoo period.

Editorial

Researched and written by John J. Mayo III, Editor, Tattoo History Atlas. This page reflects current canon as of the Status date above and is refreshed on a quarterly cycle. It keeps the 1862 Jerusalem and 1881 Japan royal tattoo events distinct and labels the popular conflation as refuted.

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