Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to be joined by Dr Matt Lodder, who's one of the UK's is the UK's premier expert on the history of tattoos and tattooing. And his new book is called

Painted People, Humanity in 21 Tattoos. Matt, welcome. Hello and thanks for having me.

It's very nice to meet you. Now, this is kind of extraordinary book because, you know,

its subject matter is something which is notoriously permanent, but the arc of the story you tell is an art historian here

is one of perpetual forgetting, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, this is really what's one of the sort of driving frustrations which led

to this project is that it felt going through, it does feel going through the historical record that

journalists and even, you know, noble and brave historians in the past have sort of tried to tell some of these stories before and explain that tattooing is, you know, has a much longer, much more diverse and much more continuous history than I think the popular culture imagines.

But none of that seems to stick, you know.

And I've been sort of frustrated for a long time with the media in the UK and in the US and elsewhere constantly saying that, you know, tattooings is a hot new trendy thing.

A hot new trendy thing now. And, you know, youing is this hot new trendy thing, hot new trendy thing now.

And, you know, you find examples of that going back 140 years at least.

And so probably naively, I hope that this book will be the last time anyone ever has to say in print that tattooing used to be confined just to sailors and soldiers.

But, you know, I'm sure I'll still be having

these conversations right up to my retirement. Yes, I think that's a very optimistic position to

take. But with a bit of luck, this book will sell a bazillion copies and people will take

its message on board. But actually, can I ask how you started yourself? I mean you're an art historian by training you're

obviously we're on a podcast rather than audio but I can see you've got lots of tattoos yourself

I mean including some facial tattoos which is yeah some small ones I'm a tattoo kind of

collector officiado first and an art historian second. I came to art history as a kind of

method set, really, as a way of looking at the world, which would help me try and make sense to

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