Japanese Tattoo
£25.99Price
A man shows off a full-back tattoo, leaning on a wooden fence in a Yokohama studio. It's a striking picture, and even more so when you know tattooing was illegal in Japan when it was taken. The government banned it in 1872, partly to look more modern in the eyes of the West. The funny thing is that Westerners couldn't get enough of it. Tattooists kept working on foreign visitors, and in 1881 two British princes, one of them the future King George V, got tattooed in Japan while serving as naval cadets. Nobody's quite sure whether Baron Raimund von Stillfried or Kusakabe Kimbei took this one, as negatives passed between their studios. Hand-coloured, restored and printed on thick, museum-grade matte paper.
• Paper thickness: 10.3 mil
• Paper weight: 189 g/m²
• Opacity: 94%
• ISO brightness: 104%
• Paper is sourced from Japan
