1911 photo of Maud Wagner. Archived at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006687059/
By the time Maud Stevens Wagner passed away on January 30, 1961, tattoos were widely available throughout the United States of America. Tattoos have a long history around the world but became popular in Europe and North America during the Victorian era. Women might have felt the need to be more discreet about their skin adornments, but they still got them. One place where women could openly show their tattoos were in the sideshows, freakshows, and circuses that toured. Wagner was not a pioneering “tattooed lady,” but she may have been the first American woman to do inking professionally.
Wagner was born on February 12, 1877, as Maud Stevens in Lyon County, Kansas. Her parents, David Van Buran Stevens and Sarah Jane McGee, were circus performers, so Wagner grew up in that culture and business. Through her parents she learned to work as an aerialist using the trapezes as well as the tightrope. She also learned to control and stretch her body and took gigs as a contortionist. She didn’t align herself with only one circus but went from company to company, traveling around America.
Wagner met her husband, Gus Wagner, at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (often called the St. Louis World's Fair), where she was performing. The man was seven years her senior and was covered in tattoos; in fact, he marketed himself as "the most artistically marked up man in America" as early as 1901. Wagner got to know the man over the course of several dates but also insisted he teach her the hand-poke method of tattooing, which he claimed he’d learned during his years in the Merchant Marine.
A few months later, Wagner agreed to marry him, and the couple went on to have two daughters, of whom only Lotteva survived beyond infancy. The family left the circus life for some reason but did not give up their nomadic ways. They began working for amusement arcades, county fairs, and vaudeville theaters across mid-America as acts but also giving tattoos to other performers and audience members for money. Wagner became the first professional woman tattoo artist in the States by just a couple of years as tattoos grew in popularity. In the big cities, machines for tattooing were gaining popularity, and some believe that the couple were among the last to use the hand-poke method until a renaissance of the practice in the late 20th century among body modification practitioners.
Wagner only allowed her husband and herself to tattoo her body, though why is unclear. Aside from her name on her left arm, reports from the shows she did say that Wagner chose typical themes for her skin, including butterflies, horses, lions, snakes, trees, and even women. Only a handful of photos survive that show even a tiny fraction of the tattoos she claimed to have.
When not on the job, Wagner’s family would seem like the typical one. Several photos of the couple and then the family of three show them in standard dress and pose for the early 20th century. The couple’s hundreds of tattoos could be easily covered by the modest dress of the age because they did not ink above their necks, even though it was common for tattooed gents and ladies in sideshows to have facial tattoos. This suggests that both Wagners valued their ability to “pass” outside of performing circles. Indeed, while the couple taught Lotteva to tattoo at perhaps as early as nine years of age, they never agreed to let her be inked, a condition she continued even as she went on to be a professional tattooist herself.
In 1941, Wagner’s husband died after a lightning strike. How did Wagner continue to support herself and her daughter? Interviews with Lotteva suggest that her mother continued tattooing and also continued to work as a sign painter, though she only signed her first initial with her surname as a way to find more public work. When her daughter got older, she, too, worked in those professions eking out a life for them in Lawton, Oklahoma, where Wagner died at the age of 84 on January 30, 1961.
When the Wagners were inking people, it wasn’t really mainstream, and legal authorities were generally unconcerned with the practice, but that started to change in the 1950s and 1960s. Tattooing is regulated at the state or city level and varied over time from place to place. In 1961, tattooing was outlawed by a New York City law until 1997, and Oklahoma had a ban on tattoo parlors from 1963 to 2006. Indiana only legalized tattoo parlors and tattooists in 1997; before then only a doctor could legally create a tattoo in the Hoosier state. While morality can sometimes be a reason behind regulations, often it is a matter of public health.
People get tattoos for a variety of reasons, and it is not uncommon today, with perhaps as many as 1 in 5 Americans reporting that they have at least one. We primarily know about Wagner today because of the popularity of tattoos and the culture that has grown up around it. Tattooing fans and historians have invested time in finding records about the Wagners and keeping them available, because they consider the family of utmost importance to the spread of the art form.