Hope and despair: The hidden meanings behind convict tattoos

ANCHORS, flags and ships may be trendy tattoos for hipsters and AFL stars but it was convicts transported to Australia who sported some of the country’s original ink.

Many convicts got tattoos on board the ships bringing them to Australia.

ANCHORS, flags and ships may be trendy tattoos for hipsters and AFL stars but it was convicts transported to Australia who sported some of the country’s original ink.

Hundreds of men and women who disembarked in the colonies had tattoos but only got them on board the ships to mark the journey into exile.

“These people very commonly employ much of their time on the passage out in puncturing with gunpowder, their hands, arms, and breast with various letters and figures,” James Ross wrote in 1833.

A convict with the words, “The knife shall never pass here” written in French around his neck. Picture: Trove (Sydney Illustrated News, 15 November 1886)

A tattoo of a convict in the 1920s with the words "Death Before Dishonour". Picture: The Mail (Adelaide, 1920)

Any defining features such as tattoos, scars and other “peculiarities” were recorded in black books and helped “assist the constables in apprehending them” if they escaped, Ross wrote.

Convicts used what they could get on board including ink, gunpowder or charcoal and used needles to pierce the skin and form the tattoos.

Water, alcohol, saliva and even urine were used to clean the blood off the needles and dilute the ink.

Transported convicts were able to get quite creative despite the crude implements and among the hundreds of popular designs some tattoos carried hidden meanings.

A convict’s initials and an anchor meant “I have hope”, initials and an upside down anchor meant “I have lost all hope” while a man carrying an anchor meant “I carry my hopes with me”.

Some designs were confined to a particular ship with a dozen convicts who arrived in Hobart on the Equestrian tattooed with a picture of the crucifixion, seven stars and four candlesticks.

There were also five convicts from the Woodford arrived in 1828 with tattoos of a beehive.

But others were more creative and sported flowerpots, mermaids, ships, flags, birds, foxes, animals, prayers and passages from the Bible.

Artist impression of convict tattoos The flowerpot tattoo was reported on over 100 convicts, but no one knows its exact meaning. Picture: Ancestry.com.au

“A powerful Irishman named Heffernan showed, when stripped, the national flag of his native isle hanging in folds over his right shoulder,” Joseph Harvie wrote about prisoners on board the convict hulk Success.

A copy of the Lord’s Prayer written on a man’s chest was described as “remarkable”.

It was “minutely inscribed in blue and red characters on the breast of a prisoner named McDonald,” Harvie wrote.

Another prisoner who arrived in 1824 instead a tattoo commemorating a famous boxing match from 36 years before he landed in Australia.

Most of the tattoos survive only as records kept in “black books” which included in-depth descriptions of a convict and identifying features in case they escaped the penal colony.

However these records were often edited, particularly if the tattoos were deemed offensive either for language or where they were placed.

Instead the clerks would simply write out “indecent word” or a vague description of where the offensive tattoo was located. Some however edited any potentially embarrassing tattoos out of the records.

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Originally published as Hope and despair: The hidden meanings behind convict tattoos