Jonathan Steinberg's first publication on the German imperial navy, his 1964 essay ‘The Kaiser's Navy and German Society’, observed that historians had paid the subject scant attention, and he went on to correct that defect in his classic study, Yesterday's Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (1968). Unaccountably missing from this pathbreaking work of reparation, however, was any discussion of naval and maritime tattooing, which was nearing the peak of its popularity in Germany just as Tirpitz's battleships were being constructed and launched and their crews mustered and trained. My essay, in turn, seeks to repair this omission in naval history by examining the work of an unusual scholar who conjured up the culture of German maritime tattooing on the eve of its decline.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Kiel, Emden, Bremerhaven and above all Hamburg and Altona boasted professional tattoo studios and flourishing tattoo cultures that catered to sailors in German and foreign navies and merchant marines, and to men in the local maritime trades. Whether Tirpitz and his fellow admirals were among the tattooed is not known, although Kaiser Wilhelm II is believed to have had a tattoo and his father, Friedrich III, certainly did. So did numerous other seafaring European royals and aristocrats in this period, who typically acquired their tattoos from experts in Jerusalem and Japan, not in the bars and back streets of their home ports. The evidence suggests that tattoos were most popular among aristocratic and working-class men, groups at polar ends of the social scale. By contrast, officers of the German navy – a ‘career for young men of middle-class backgrounds’ – may have shared a bourgeois immunity to the lure of inked flesh in the same way that they disdained the duel. And whether or not the Kaiser had his own tattoos, his portrait, like those of other royals, was on offer to anyone looking for a patriotic tattoo, alongside ships, flags, eagles and the Hohenzollern motto, ‘Vom Fels zum Meer’ (‘from the cliff to the sea’).

Tattoos, it is well known, are for life – but only for life. The images vanish with their bearers, and only if they are recorded at the time of their production can we reconstruct the history of this cultural practice anywhere in the world.