Mixed feelings about this article published in this weekend’s edition of ‘Wysokie Obcasy,’ a weekend extra of one of major Polish newspapers. On the one hand, it’s good when tattooing gets more publicity and keeps losing all the negative associations; on the other hand, however, it would be nice if journalists did their research for once.

Even without much digging and error hunting in this piece, it’s too easy to point out at least a few errors and omissions:

– a picture of ‘unknown woman from the beginning of the 20th cent.’ is actually a picture of Betty Broadbent who was born in the first decade of the 20th century and started her career later.

– a picture of Lady Viola is used as a picture of La Belle Irene (this mistake can even be excused as some websites make the same mistake; I’m relying here on the BME encyclopedia and ‘The Tattooed Lady’ book by Amelia Klem Osterud – if these sources are wrong, so am I);

– a picture of an Ainu woman is there for no real reason as tribal female tattooing isn’t discussed at all and that’s a shame;

– the New York City’s tattoo ban was, according to the author, related to a HIV outbreak while, in fact, it was related to a few cases of Hepatitis B (HIV was discovered later);

– modern female tattoo artists aren’t mentioned at all;

– the author mentions using only one book while working on the article and it’s a shame, too. And even tho I do can understand that it might be hard to get more reading material, if I were this journalist, I would have just visited some local tattoo artists to see what books they have at their studios and this way I could read more than just one book (not to mention that there are many websites, good ones, focused on the history of tattoos).

I hate when there are mistakes in articles; it always makes me wonder what else is wrong in my reading materials and I’m usually too lazy to cross-reference and check the facts on my own 😉