The original tattooed ladies intrigue me. It must have taken courage for a woman to lead an unconventional lifestyle in the first part of the last century, and the thing that all these painted ladies had in common was their independence and resilience in the face of prejudice: Artoria Gibbons worked her way out of poverty by travelling with a sideshow in her youth, but was sold to the public as a “man-made monstrosity” in later life; Irene “La Belle Irene” Woodward’s promotional booklet claimed that her father was killed in a Native American raid in 1879 and only survived herself because the attackers were scared away by her tattoos; Nora Hildenbrandt told a similar story, later deemed to be false; Annie Howard was briefly imprisoned for slapping a man who insulted her tattoos; Betty Broadbent began sideshow life as a teenage runaway with an image of her head projected onto the body of a spider and went on to marry three times.
