Needle Work

A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada

Jamie Jelinski

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Hardback

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English

McGill-Queen's University Press
15 June 2024

History of Art & Design Styles; Body art & tattooing; Popular culture

Series: McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History

In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients.

From this early example of tattooing as work, Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career.

Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered.

By: Jamie Jelinski
Imprint: McGill-Queen's University Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 178mm,
ISBN: 9780228021988
ISBN 10: 0228021987
Series: McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History
Pages: 424
Publication Date: 15 June 2024
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jamie Jelinski is an interdisciplinary scholar of visual culture. He lives in Montreal.

Reviews for Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada

“This meticulously researched volume is essential reading on the understudied development, practice, business, and (art) history of commercial tattooing in Canada. As the first book dedicated to the subject, Needle Work breaks new theoretical ground on mechanized body marking and honours the contributions of groundbreaking and long-forgotten tattoo practitioners working north of the American border.” Lars Krutak, author of Tattoo Traditions of Native North America: Ancient and Contemporary Expressions of Identity