Tattoo Parlor, Singapore

    "In this latter [the Japanese] section, a Mr. Kaneta operated the Japanese equivalent of an apothecary shop, which he obligingly closed with shutters and left when told there were in the Pilgrim some virgin areas of backs and arms whose owners had been looking forward to his embellishment with his tattooing needles ever since his fame had been brought to Boston by the crew of the schooner Chance.  The chart house was turned into an operating room while the Chief underwent some three days of suffering for a full size, shoulder-to-shoulder canvas of a cockfight, and Joe submitted himself to a similar agony for a writhing dragon of similar shape.  The Skipper, meanwhile, acquired a dragon "gut-piece" which was necessarily small because of a limited area of the only remaining epidermis above his waist.
    I settled for  watching the procedures and easing my shipmates' pain.  Mr. Kaneta worked from paper sketches, which he copied freely in outline with crayon onto the skin.  Then he made his indelible marks with an instrument like a small spade whose blade was a closely set row of sharp needles dipped in green, blue, red, or yellow ink.  It was not hard to persuade his walking canvases to display these labors."  [275-75.]

© Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; reproduced by permission of the publisher.