Skin-Deep

By electrical means, without pain

Your pure epidermis may gain

From head unto heels--// the idea appeals--Decorations of which you will be vain,

Thus one of the most popular artists in Manhattan's Chinatown, the late Charlie Wagner, advertised his pictures. Until his death last New Year's Day, Wagner was one of a race of picture makers whose canvas is the human skin. The history of his profession is outlined in a short, bright book published last week: Pierced Hearts and True Love, by Hans Ebensten (British Book Centre; $3).

Ebensten sets out to tell how tattooing "has developed during the 4,000 years that separate the butterfly on Field Marshal Montgomery's right arm and the tattoos discovered on the skins of Egyptian mummies dating to 2000 B.C." In the year 787, a Roman Catholic council forbade all forms of it in Europe. It thrived among the savages. Captain Cook reported the practice on his first voyage (1768-1771), introducing the Tahitian word tatau--to mark.

Shortly thereafter sailors began to acquire skin pictures in foreign ports. It was thought that a seaman who could stand the pain of having a full-rigged ship tattooed on himself would automatically make a good topman. By the late 19th century Japan had come to be considered the chief home of the art. Aristocrats from around the globe visited the studio of one Hori Chyo, in Yokohama, to obtain such delicate decorations as a fool-the-eye fly tattooed on the hand. London's Sutherland Macdonald was the first European practitioner of any pretensions; among other designs, he offered a hunt with horses and red-coated riders pursuing a fox.

The Polynesians used tattooing as a substitute for decorative clothes, covering their torsos with equivalents of California sport shirts. Few Westerners, excepting side show performers, go so far. But, Ebensten recalls, "A well-built man with a massive chest used to saunter along [London's] Edgeware Road in the hot summer of 1949 with his shirt open to the waist, proudly revealing a great scene of Mount Calvary." Denmark's King Frederik sports an array of Oriental dragons.

Says Ebensten: "The tattooist is almost a fairy-tale figure, hovering in his gloomy, weirdly decorated and mysterious little shop like some grotesque but bewitching hermit ..." But since World War I, tattooing has steadily declined. It is too conservative, for one thing, holding to such dull, outmoded motifs as Mickey Mouse, foul anchors, and bathing belles of yesteryear. Ebensten laments: "No atom bomb explodes on any lusty chest."

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