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Editorial Policy

Editor John J. Mayo III, Editor, Tattoo History Atlas Reviewed 2026-05-28

Every claim on Tattoo History Atlas is anchored to a named source, hedged at the confidence tier of the underlying research entry, and reviewed quarterly against the production archive. This page documents how the editorial process actually works: the Anchoring Rule, the confidence tiers, the dash ban and slang ban, the corrections protocol, the cultural-context constraints on indigenous and sacred traditions, and the living-person caution. If a published page disagrees with this policy, the policy wins and the page is corrected.

The Anchoring Rule

The foundational claim-level rule on this site is the Anchoring Rule: every substantive assertion must carry at least three of the following four anchors.

  1. Time (year, decade, or precisely dated event)
  2. Place (city, region, named site, or coordinates)
  3. Named person (the practitioner, scholar, institution, or principal involved)
  4. Source (primary monograph, primary press, institutional collection, or research entry)

A claim that carries fewer than three anchors is either hedged with explicit confidence language, supplemented before publication, or held back until the missing anchor is found. The rule is the operational defense against the "tattoo lore" mode where assertions float without verifiable backing.

An example. The claim "Joseph Banks wrote 'tattow' in his journal aboard HMS Endeavour at Matavai Bay, Tahiti, on 5 July 1769" carries time (5 July 1769), place (Matavai Bay, Tahiti), person (Joseph Banks), and source (the Endeavour Journal, held at the State Library of New South Wales). Four anchors, full lock. The earlier version of this assertion as it circulates on derivative tattoo-history pages ("Captain Cook coined the word tattoo") has zero anchors; it names a person (Cook), gets the person wrong, and provides no source. The Atlas does not publish at the second level of rigor.

Confidence tiers

Every research entry and every published claim carries an explicit confidence tier inherited from the underlying research. The five tiers in active use:

  • VERIFIED. Multiple independent sources converge; primary documentation or institutional records are accessible; no significant scholarly dispute. Example: Ötzi's tattoo count (61 tattoos in 19 groups, per Samadelli et al. 2015, Journal of Cultural Heritage).
  • MIXED. The spine of the claim is verified; specific sub-claims are disputed, single-source, or hedged. Example: the Razzouk family's continuous Jerusalem operation is VERIFIED from c. 1750 (the 1749-dated Armenian-script olive-wood block anchors the date), but the family's c. 1300 / 700-year Egyptian origin is FOLKLORIC and rests on family oral tradition.
  • SINGLE-SOURCE. The claim circulates with documentary backing in exactly one source register. Treated with caution; cross-checking is a research priority. Example: Yacoub Razzouk's introduction of the first electric tattoo machine in Mandate Palestine in the 1930s rests on family-published history and Krutak's reportage; no independent corroboration has been surfaced.
  • DISPUTED. Two or more reasonable sources offer competing accounts; the canonical narrative is not yet established. Example: the identity of Horiyoshi II (Wikipedia identifies him as Shodai Horiyoshi's son who first tattooed Nakano; the Kingsavetattoo trade-press disambiguation page identifies the famous published "Horiyoshi II" as a Tokyo-based Kuronuma-family tattooer unrelated to the Yokohama line). The Atlas carries both readings and flags the dispute.
  • FOLKLORIC. The claim is well-circulated in popular sources but not supported by primary documentation. Carried in the entry where culturally salient, but explicitly flagged as folkloric and not propagated as fact. Example: Nora Hildebrandt's "captured by Sitting Bull, forcibly tattooed" performance narrative is FOLKLORIC; her career and tattoo work are VERIFIED.

When a published page summarizes a research entry, the page inherits the entry's confidence tier. A VERIFIED entry yields a page with confident framing; a MIXED entry yields a page that hedges the disputed sub-claims and names the dispute; a FOLKLORIC framing is named as such in the prose and excluded from any extracted Q&A item that would teach it as fact.

Voice and style rules

The Atlas uses a specific scholarly register, locked at the document level.

No em-dashes, no en-dashes, no double-hyphen shorthand. The em-dash, the en-dash, and the double-hyphen ASCII shorthand are banned in published prose, headings, callouts, bylines, JSON-LD descriptions, and meta tags. The ban was locked on 2026-05-26 after the dash pattern was identified as a cadence signal that compromises the scholarly register. Replacement strategy: commas, periods (sentence breaks), colons, or parentheses, depending on what the dash was doing. Regular hyphens (compound modifiers, proper nouns, URL slugs) are unaffected.

No slang for the practice. The verb "to ink" and the noun "ink" as a synonym for tattoo work are banned in editorial prose. "Ink" is used only when it refers literally to the pigment. "Tattoo gun" is banned unless quoted directly from a source. The correct term is "tattoo machine," and where a specific machine architecture is named, the canonical historical terminology ("coil machine," "rotary machine," "irons" in Paul Rogers's trade vocabulary) is used.

Against machine cadence. Beyond the dash ban, the editorial pass watches for the broader stylistic register that signals machine-generated prose: the formulaic transition phrases ("It's important to note that," "In summary," "Furthermore"), the hedge-then-pivot construction, the bullet-point pile-up where prose would do, the repeated qualifier strings. The voice rule is direct, claim-first, source-anchored prose. A reader should be able to tell, by paragraph three, that the page was written by a person who knows the subject.

Cultural register. Profanity, vulgarity, and reclaimed terms are acceptable in artist-supplied content (the contribution flow's UGC layer, when shipped). They are not used in editorial prose on the foundation pages, the canon documents, or the motif Pocket Guides. Targeting individuals is the line; the editorial voice is sharp but not personal.

Corrections protocol

Errors in published material are corrected directly and acknowledged in the entry's correction log.

When a factual error is identified (whether through internal review, external submission, or scholarly source update), the protocol is:

  1. Investigate at archive tier. The research entry behind the page is checked first. If the archive is correct and the page is wrong, the page is fixed. If the archive is also wrong, the source register is re-examined and the archive is corrected, then the page.
  1. Log the correction. Each significant correction is recorded in a logged correction registry. The correction note states what the prior version said, what the corrected version says, and the source that supports the correction. Significant corrections are flagged in a "Corrections Logged" section on the affected page or research entry.
  1. Preserve the audit trail. Pre-correction text is preserved in the archive's versioned files where editorially relevant. The site does not silently rewrite history; substantive corrections leave a documented trail.
  1. Acknowledge external contributions. If the correction came from an external source, the contributor is named in the entry's editorial footer (opt-in) and credited with Archive XP under the contribution recognition system. Spurious or bad-faith submissions are not surfaced and do not earn credit.

The major corrections logged in 2026 to date include: Maud Stevens Wagner married Gus Wagner, not Charlie Wagner; Sailor Jerry's Japan correspondent was Horihide of Gifu, not Horiyoshi II of Yokohama; Don Ed Hardy holds a San Francisco Art Institute BFA in printmaking and declined a Yale graduate fellowship (his degree is not from Yale); Keone Nunes is alive (primary-source living-presence anchor at the Sawasdee Bangkok Tattoo Show, October 2025); Joseph Banks, not Cook, wrote "tattow" first; the Good Time Charlie's Tattooland founding shop address in East LA was on Whittier Boulevard, not Figueroa Street.

Cultural-context constraints

Indigenous and sacred tattoo traditions are treated according to the senior-authority protocols established within each lineage.

Samoan tatau, Tongan tatatau, Marquesan patutiki, Hawaiian kākau, and Māori tā moko are covered under the cultural-context protocols of their respective lineages: the tufuga ta tatau title-conferral structure for Samoan and (via the Sulu'ape stewardship) Tongan; the tohunga tā moko and Te Uhi a Mataora institutional authority for Māori; the kahuna kākau and Sulu'ape-conferred title authority for Hawaiian. Pages on these traditions name the senior practitioners and the title structure, observe the distinction between traditional whakapapa-encoded work and the kirituhi non-genealogical register, and do not describe sacred protocols at a level of detail that would constitute appropriation.

Sak Yant, the Cambodian and Thai sacred-tattoo tradition, is covered with explicit acknowledgment of the religious context (the practice is administered by Buddhist monks and ajarns within ritually constrained ceremonies) and the limits of what scholarly description can responsibly transmit.

The Razzouk Coptic Christian tradition is covered as the lineage describes itself: 27 to 28 generations, c. 1300 Egyptian origin (FOLKLORIC at the strong-form level), c. 1750 Jerusalem operation (VERIFIED), continuous pilgrim-tattoo practice serving multi-denominational Christian clients.

Yakuza-associated irezumi is covered as a historical and sociological tradition without romanticizing or sensationalizing the criminal-organization context. The pages treat the yakuza-irezumi association as the structural consequence of the seventy-six-year Meiji ban (1872 to 1948), name the institutional history clearly, and respect Horiyoshi III's stated position that irezumi was meant to function as a private, hidden register.

Russian Criminal Tattoos (the Vorovskoy Mir tradition) and American prison tattooing are covered with the same sociological register. The pages name the coded meanings within the source subcultures and explicitly distinguish coded tattoos from decorative work on individuals outside the subculture.

Auschwitz tattooing (the concentration-camp identification numbers) is covered as Holocaust history. The pages name the practice as the atrocity it was and do not aestheticize it.

Living-person caution

Pages on living practitioners observe the following caution.

No death claims without primary-source verification. A logged correction, applied across multiple entries on 2026-05-14, refutes a 2024 death claim on Keone Nunes that had propagated through tertiary aggregator sources. Nunes was alive at the time of the claim and remains alive as of this writing (Sawasdee Bangkok Tattoo Show, October 2025). The protocol is: death claims require an obituary in a named newspaper, a family or institutional announcement, or equivalent primary-source documentation. Tertiary web summaries do not count.

Privacy in non-professional life. Living practitioners' family relationships, faith, addiction history, and private legal matters are included on pages only when the practitioner has placed those topics in the public record themselves (memoir, on-the-record interview, public statement) and only to the extent relevant to the professional biography.

Right of reply. Living practitioners who have substantive corrections to their own atlas entries are given a documented right of reply through the contribution system. The corrections process treats subject-of-entry submissions with the same source-register scrutiny as third-party submissions; if a practitioner says something happened and provides a documented anchor, the anchor is reviewed and the page is corrected.

Generated-content policy

Every published page is human-edited against named sources before publication.

The Atlas does not publish pages generated automatically from prompts. It does not generate atlas entries, motif pages, or campaign chapters automatically. The archive is human-built; the canon is human-edited; the published pages are reviewed by the editor before they ship.

Conflicts of interest

The Atlas does not accept paid placements, sponsored editorial, affiliate compensation for product recommendations, or commercial sponsorship of atlas entries. The Pocket Guide pages, the atlas entries, and the foundation pages are editorially independent.

Where brands appear in the historical record (the Sailor Jerry rum brand owned by William Grant and Sons since 2008; the Ed Hardy fashion line licensed through Christian Audigier, Hardy Way LLC, and Iconix Brand Group; the Spaulding & Rogers tattoo equipment company), the naming is part of the historical material and is editorially constrained. No commercial relationship between the named brands and the Atlas exists or is sought.

The pricing model (free atlas; $7 per month or $60 per year Premium; $20 per month Pro Studio for four seats) is the project's revenue model. Subscribers fund the work. No editorial content is gated behind the subscription tier; the apprentice study mode is the gated feature. The substantive layer (atlas entries, motif pages, campaign canon, foundation pages) is permanently free.

Quarterly review

Foundation pages, motif pages, and atlas entries are reviewed quarterly against the live archive. The review checks for:

  • New research entries that should be propagated to live pages
  • Updated confidence tiers on existing entries
  • New corrections logged since the last review
  • Living-person status updates (active, retired, deceased)
  • New named-source releases (scholarly publications, institutional exhibitions, primary-press features)
  • Schema markup compliance against the current Schema.org specification

The review cycle is documented in the editorial-process internal documentation. Pages carry the Last reviewed date at the top; if a page is overdue for review by more than one quarter, it is flagged for prioritization.

Editorial

Researched and written by John J. Mayo III, Editor, Tattoo History Atlas. This page is refreshed on a quarterly cycle. Last reviewed 2026-05-28.

Found an error or have a source to add? Submit to the Archive. Accepted contributions earn Archive XP and named recognition (opt-in).