the art and its masters

the rough work of the American tattooers. The Americanmasters reply that they can't help it, that the Americanplebs care not for dainty detail, that the order is for abig splash at a small expense in a jiffy.

The love and patriotism designs are of uniquely Americanorigin. American sailors used them in the early days of therepublic to express their sentiments, and, allegedly, to pro-vide means of identification in cases of drowning or of mortalbattle wounds. Each new war created new designs. The CivilWar left its record of tattooed pictures of victorious Monitorsand mottoes extolling the Union. The Spanish- Americanconflict boosted pictures of steam- battleships crowding outthe sailships hitherto overwhelmingly popular among thetattoo- fans; the World War brought in its wake tattooed rep-resentations of airplanes and aviators, also pictures of RedCross girls with the inscription:" Rose of No Man's Land."

"*

The birth of the newspaper comic strip found its reflectionin the orders for tattooed replicas of Mutt and Jeff, Jiggsand Maggie, Pop- Eye, the Katzenjammer Kids, Felix the Cat,and the like. New popular phrases such as" So's your oldman, were imprinted on the skin shortly after they werecoined. The movies brought a batch of orders for the por-traits of favorite actors and actresses, including Rin- Tin- Tin,to be duplicated on the biceps and shoulders. The latestwrinkles are Marlene Dietrich and Mickey Mouse. Mickey,having become a folk character, will probably outlast Mar-lene. The war- time fad of tattooing pictures of airplanes andairmen was revived in the middle 1920's, the sensation ofLindbergh's flight across the Atlantic serving as a tremen-dous impetus. Thousands of tattoo- addicts rushed to theneedlemen and ordered designs of airplanes inscribed" The

* An illustration accompanied by a So's- your- old- man inscription wasordered from Frank Graf by a sailor. It was the picture of a monkey hangingfrom a tree by its tail. The sailor's own idea.

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