Ducky's - "the Boogeymen of the Bronx"

Bibby Cuddahy was a Ducky Boy.  And like most Ducky Boys he was Irish, under five-foot-six, and crazy. Webster Avenue was Ducky Boy country. They roamed their turf like midget dinosaurs, brainless and fearless. They respected only nuns and priests. They would fight anyone and everyone and they'd never lose. They'd never lose because there were hundreds of them. Hundreds of stunted Irish madmen with crucifixes tattooed on their arms and chests, lunatics with that terrifying, slightly cross-eyed stare of the one-dimensional semihuman, urban punk killing machine. And they were nasty -- used tire chains, car aerials, and the "Webster Avenue walking stick," a baseball bat studded with razors. (The Wanderers, Novel by Richard Price, 1974)

Book: Lost Boys of the Bronx: The Oral History of the Ducky Boys Gang

U meni je grozno izgledalo

„Credendo vides“  tetovirano je velikim slovima na podlaktici Felicitas Auersperg. Prevedeno to znači: "Vjerujući ćeš vidjeti".
"Vidiš samo ono u što vjeruješ. Ja vidim slobodu. Moja majka vidi vjeru ", kaže ova 38-godišnjakinja. Dvije riječi iz latinskog - dva različita svijeta. A između mnogo prostora za svađu. Dizajnerku je njezina majka odgojila strogo prema pravoslavnim vrijednostima.
"Djelovalo se, ali se nije proispitivalo. To me je ljutilo."
Uz to je došlo da je morala pohađati rimokatoličku samostansku školu.
"Učile su me časne sestre. Svugdje su bili križevi s tim siromahom na njima. Imala sam toliko pitanja. Zašto bih ja trebala biti nečista kao žena? Zašto imam istočni grijeh? Nisam dobijala odgovore. Osjećala sam se kao Alisa u zemlji čudesa. "
Ona je čeznula za životom Pipi Duge Čarape. I na kraju, mala Alisa se pretvorila u Pipi. U dobi od 16 godina, ona je htjela istupiti iz pravoslavne zajednice. "Uslijedila je prijetnja, da će u tom slučaju moja majka biti izopćena."
Felizitas Auersperg nije istupila, ali je prekinula s vjerom. Pohađanje katoličke škole postalo je nepodnošljivo.
"Bila sam zarobljena u kavezu doktrine. To me je izjelo iznutra. Skoro da nema dječijih  fotografija  u kojima se smijem."
Prešla je u višu školu za dizajn tekstila - okružena slobodnim dušama.
"To je bilo kao u raju."
Kod kuće su uslijedili dueli u vrištanju. Nakon što su svađe postale sve žešće, sa 17  godina preselila se u jedan mali stan.
"Sama sam sebi finansirala svoj život. I dobila moju prvu tetovažu."
U međuvremenu, kći i majka su se opet zbližile. Ali rasprava o životu i vrijednostima ima kao i prije.

Tekst: Andrea Mann // Foto: Hanna Haböck
Iz njemačkog preveo Branislav Knežević
Izvor

Three years behind the guns - Tattooing

Three years behind the guns, the true chronicles of a "diddy-box," by L.G.T.; illustrated by Chris J©œrgensen and George Varian and with photographs.1908

Musezibtum and Narum

Babylonians and Assyrians; life and customs, by the Rev. A. H. Sayce.1990

Tattooed Men for Spain.

Time. v.4 no.93 1886.
Tid-Bits an Illustrated Weekly For These Times
New York, may 22, 1886.
 

"Ja bih lahko poznala Ivana - Na ruci mu keršteno zlamenje"

U ovoj lijepoj narodnoj pjesmi pronašao spomen o tetoviranju. Ovdje se tetoviranje spominje kao biljeg krštenja odnosno krsni znamen (keršteno zlamenje). U narodnim pjesmama sam već nekoliko puta naišao na spominjanje tetoviranja. Uglavnom je povezano sa prepoznavanjem, kao oznaka identiteta, kako u dobru tako i u zlu.
Branislav Knežević, 28.10.2014

Narodne piesme Bosanske i Hercegovačke. Skupio Ivan Franjo Jukić, banjolučanin i Ljubomir Hercegovac (Fr. Gr. Martić). Izdao O. Filip Kunić, kuprješanin. sv.l. Piesme junačke. (U Osieku, Tiskom C. K. Povl. Tiskarne Drag. Lehmanna i Drugara, 1858.)

 Izvor

Ivo Senjanin i Mijat Berdarić

  "Od rođenja do smrti sve je bilo u znaku vjere. Kad bi se dijete rodilo i babica mu povezala pupak, već drugi ili treći dan njega je kuma, u pratnji jedne žene, u povojima nosila na krštenje, čekajući pred masivnim vratima crkve "ujaka" da je u crkvu uvede, i to kumče iz krstionice poškropi i znamenuje svetom vodom i tako ga primi u zajednicu kršćanskoga puka. Prodorni plač djeteta označio bi da je crkva dobila još jednog novog člana. Taj biljeg krštenja često bi se kasnije tetoviranjem neizbrisivo ubocao na ruku krštenika kako bi se znalo da je kršćanin i kada bi ga Turci odveli u janjičare ili prodali u ropstvo." (Prof. Franjo Kristić,  Tramošnički spomenar, 2002) Izvor

Mr. Meeson's will in execution (tattooing scene)

Preferred Citation: Christ, Carol T., and John O. Jordan, editors Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1995 1995.  SOURCE

Mr. Meeson's Will (online literature)

 

 

 Augusta Smithers is a frustrated best-selling first author, financially cheated by her contractual obligations to the huge Birmingham firm of Meeson's. A series of improbable events precipitates her into love with the proprietor's son—and precipitates her and the father overboard together in the subsequent shipwreck of a passenger liner. Washed to a forlorn shore with him and a few other survivors, Augusta arrives at the moral dilemma of the novel: whether to sacrifice herself, out of love for her fiancé, to allow the dying and now repentent father to write a last will that would reverse his recent disinheriting of the young man. The difficulty is that in the absence of all normal writing materials, the amended will can only be inscribed on her neck and shoulders by a sailor, one Bill Jones, willing to undertake the tattooing assignment. If she had wanted, for instance, "a fancy pictur of your young man, I might manage it on your arm," but for a "doccyment" of the sort in question "one wants space."^[11] Instead of indulging herself with an erotic fetish, then, she must in her own person become a legal one. Augusta of course stalwartly submits to the painful inscription (Fig. 95). She then delivers the signature and dictates of paternal intention into a court of law, where the very admissibility of her text, of herself as text—still sight unseen—is ponderously debated, only to be read into evidence at last in an eroticized spectacle of disclosure that saves the day and helps unite her with her lover (Fig. 96). This resulting union with her fiancé is witnessed by his embrace of the heroine's body, marked as it is by the material index, the wound, of familial sanction and continuity. From financially abused writer to painfully inscribed text: such is the heroine's sacrificial decline. If woman in the standard Victorian marriage plot may at any point operate merely as signifier of patriarchal intentionality, sign and prize of a hero's coming into his majority, here the fiancée—as corporeal text of the would-be father-in-law's will—is a reductio ad absurdum of that signifying function. In a nightmare contortion of female expressivity, the heroine, once having written to be read, achieves the deserved financial reward of her popular success only after being read in her own person at last.

And read not just by the staring court. For, in her own readable figure, Augusta Smithers becomes the novel's title figure.^[12] She stands before us as Mr. Meeson's Will incarnate, heroine of the illustrated novel that the Victorian reader here sees—and I choose the dead metaphor advisedly—to completion. Then, too, the juridical logic implied by this climactic courtroom scene of actionable decipherment cagily doubles for the interpretive signals of a more familiar novelistic rhetoric. The judge, that is, speaking with the dubiousness of a critical reader, nonetheless succumbs to credulity with the ultimate cliché of documentary verification in those exotic late-Victorian thrillers of which Haggard is to become the best-selling master: "The whole tale is undoubtedly of a wild and romantic order, and once again illustrates the saying that 'truth is stranger than fiction'" (262).

In all this, the levels of implication emerge in a form that verges on a fourfold allegory: biological, erotic, generic, and finally textual. The woman's body is always in one sense the conduit for patriarchal succession. So much, first, for woman as wife: potential gestational vessel awaiting the biological imprint of the male will. Second, erotically, the woman's body is immediately reinscribed into just that masculine line of succession as object of desire and exchange. Third, generically, the fetishized female form is the very figure for the spectacle either of family melodrama or of exotic romance, what Barthes calls the "striptease" of narrative disclosure itself. It is only at the fourth—the textual—level that we come around to the promised photographic moment that the reader may have thought this paper was losing sight of.

No, it is the story itself that seems to forget its own photographic twist. For nothing is mentioned during the final courtroom disrobing about a transitional bit of prudent jurisprudence by which the legality of the woman as text can be ratified. The intermediate chapter is called "How Augusta Is Filed" and narrates the brainstorm by which the Court Registrar hits on "something better than a certified copy of the will," namely "a photographic copy" (213). After the appointed photographer "took two or three shots at her back," he promised "that he would bring a life-sized reproduction to be filed in the Registry in a couple of days" (215–16). The much-reduced novelistic illustrations are of course all we actually see, except as we visualize the life-size Augusta in court, the former novelist as text, embodying her own testamentary declaration. In sum, between the woman as readable writer at the start of the novel and the female body as legible text in the climactic trial by evidentiary ordeal, what has intervened is the photographic equivalent of literary textuality: the character-as print phenomenon, a textual figuration to be archived (or elsewhere marketed) and read upon demand.

In that climactic courtroom illustration, the magnifying glass in the judge's hands is the ultimate tease. Reaching for one of our own, in order to make out the writing that was so clear in the earlier etching (the "I leave all" of the tattooing-in-progress), we find what we might have suspected: that the full and decisive text is mere indecipherable hatchings (see enlargement, Fig. 97). What is legibly incised there is only the woman's body itself, not the signifiers it is supposed to carry. That body is what we are all there, and all we are there, to read.

1-Fig. 95.:Mr. Meeson's will in execution (tattooing scene), from H. Rider Haggard,
Mr. Meeson's Will,  1888.

2-Fig. 96.: Courtroom disrobing, from H. Rider Haggard,  Mr. Meeson's Will,  1888.

3-Fig. 97.: Detail of Fig. 96.

The Western Orient - The custom of tattooing among Muslim pilgrims

TATTOOING - ORIENTAL AND GIPSY

by Albert Thomas Sinclair, American Anthropologist, Volume 10, Issue 3, 1908

Das Bild des Johannes den Evangelisten mit Feder und Buch als tätowiertes Pilgerzeichen in Jerusalem 1856

Das beigefügte Bild dient der Illustration. Ich vermute die Originalvorlage als einfacher und reduziert in der Ausführung. (Branislav Knežević)

 

"Denkblätter aus Jerusalem, 1856, By: Tobler, Titus., S.204-206
Eine merkwürdige Ziererei der Haut bei frauen und noch mehr bei Männern ist die bleibende Färbung und Zeichnung der Haut durch Tätowiren. Namentlich Pilger wollen ein solches unauslöschliches Andenken nach Hause bringen. Doch machen die Griechen eine Ausnahme, indem sie es, laut der Schrift, für Sünde halten. Die Pilgerzeichen trägt man gewöhnlich am Forderarme, manchmal wohl auch auf der Brust. In Jerusalem geben sich mit dem Tätowiren fünfzehn Männer, so Lateiner als Armenier, ab. Die Operazion heißt bei den Arabern Dak 1 (Berggren (1,329) schreibt Dass und Lane (1,´56) duck´ck.) und wurde zu meiner Zeit in einem Hause zwischen der neuen Taferne und dem großen armenischen Kloster verrichtet. Zum Tätowiren bedarf man eines Models, eines Farbstoffes und eines Stechinstrumentes. Der Model ist von Holz wie bei unsern Druckern, aber doppelt, d.h., zu Ersparung von Holz erscheinen auf beiden Seiten zwei verschiedene Model. Es gibt überhaupt eine kleine Auswahl von Bildern oder Zeichen, die man auf die Haut überträgt. Ein Bild z.B. stellte Johannes den Evangelisten mit Feder und Buch dar. Der Farbstoff, in einem bleirenen, kegelförmigen gefäße aufbewahrt, und etwas dicker, als Tinte, so wie von Farbe blau, besteht aus einer Mischung von Schießpulver, Indigo und Essig. Der Araber nennt das Gemische Che.ber oder heber (Tinte). Dieses Pigemnt wird auf den Model gestrichen, dieser auf die Haut gedruckt, und so erhält man den Abdruck. Nun streicht der Operator Farbe in die Nähe der zeichnung, ergreift mi der linken, Haut anspannend, den zu operirenden Theil, und mit der Rechten operirt er, in der er eine feine, lange, mit einer Art Handgriff versehene Doppelnadel hält, um diese, in die Farbe getupft, 1.. tief den gedruckten Linien nach einzustechen 2. (wenn ich mich recht erinnere, heißt dieses Stechen bei den Arabern Stobtim.) Solches geschieht mit vieler Gewandheit. Sehr selten fließt ein wenig Blut nach. Allerdings verursacht die Operation einige, doch keine bedeutende Schmerzen. Der Arm zeigte bei einem Manne eine Gänsehaut. Am meisten Schmerzen erregt es, wenn, nach Vollendung der Stiche, die Farbe kräftig eingerieben wird. Die Operazion nimmt für einen Arm allein einen halben Tag weg, und kostet dann 10 Piaster. ich sah einen Arm einen Tag nach dem Dak (Tätowiren); die Entzündung oder Reizung war höchst geringe, und ich hörte sonst nichts von nachteiligen Folgen." 

Kršćanske tetovaže kroz povijest i danas - Christian tattoos throughout history and today

Izvori i opisi fotografija - Sources and descriptions of photos

Fotografije: