Whether you’re repulsed by or devoted to tattoos, it’s hard to deny their significance in human history. Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,000-year-old mummy, sported sixty-one small lines of ink around his body. Body modification has long been used around the globe to denote characteristics like strength, social standing, or battle experience. In modern-day Lethbridge, many of us wear them for a slightly less compelling reason; we like how they look!

For Europeans, that wasn’t always the case. In the Victorian era, tattoos were seen as the mark of criminals, circus performers, sailors, and prostitutes. For some of these groups, they served a practical purpose; unique tattoos, for example, made it easier to identify a sailor’s drowned body. Nevertheless—despite whispers of “7.5% of London’s most fashionable women” sporting them in 1880—this stigma almost certainly came to Lethbridge with its first European colonizers. It is important to note that tattooing was practiced for centuries among many Indigenous tribes in Canada, including (but certainly not limited to) the Haida and Cree communities. The brutality with which colonizers attempted to eradicate it, along with many other sacred and ancient traditions, has lasting impacts; many are only known today due to extensive revival efforts by Indigenous activists.

Tattoos became more common among Americans as the decades passed, though Alberta was slower to accept the practice. When Herald reporter Shirley Macey got one in 1976, there was only one licensed shop in the province—Pat’s Tattoo Shop in Edmonton. Despite growing popularity, Lethbridge did not have a professional shop until Tattoo Town opened on 3 Ave in 1995.

Before 1995, however, Lethbridgians weren’t without options. John Poulsen, who opened Splashing Ink in Fort Macleod in 1992, once estimated to Herald reporters that he had “probably done half the people from Lethbridge who have tattoos.” Those who couldn’t make the trip—or, perhaps more frequently, were under 18 without parental consent—tried more questionable approaches. Unlicensed artists, nicknamed “scratchers,” still have a reputation of inferior and unsanitary work in the tattoo community. Poulsen noted customer complaints about unlicensed Lethbridge artists who reused the same needles and ink between different people. This was evidently based in some truth, as by 1994, the Lethbridge Health Unit reported receiving at least two complaints per month about infections and unsanitary practices by unlicensed artists. In a 1996 article, one artist at Tattoo Town estimated there were at least a dozen “scratchers” in Lethbridge.

Today, however, Lethbridge boasts over 20 professional studios, with its annual Windy City Tattoo convention drawing a considerable crowd each year. When things finally change, they change fast—a claim proven time and again through Lethbridge’s history. Want proof? Visit galtmuseum.com/research to start looking.

References

• Poulsen estimates he’s worked on “half the people in Lethbridge who have tattoos” —Lethbridge Herald June 3, 1993, pg. 27

• Tattoo Town artists estimate about a dozen scratchers in Leth —Lethbridge Herald Sept 11, 1996, pg. 13

• LHU reports at least 2 scratcher complaints/month —Lethbridge Herald May 22, 1994, pg. 2

• And then this is the 1880 NYT article, which is behind a paywall because we live in dystopia. Jan 30, 1880, “Tattooing.”