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‘Gentlemen shared their tattoos over dinner’: how our taste for tattoos started with the rich

Highly decorated skin is everywhere these days, but tattoos have a more elevated pedigree than you may think. A new book aims to make us think differently about Victorian aristocrats and bank managersIn an age in which it appears impossible to walk down the high street every summer without being confronted by countless examples of inked flesh, you may be inclined to think that tattoos are no longer associated with the underground, or indeed the underclass. But the history of the practice is long and winding. A Vanity Fair account from 1926 is typical of many similar interventions both before and after: “Tattooing has passed from the savage to the sailor, from the sailor to the landsman. It has since percolated through the entire social stratum; tattooing has received its credential...

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