Maud Wagner was a circus performer and the first known female tattoo artist in the United States.
Wagner was an aerialist and contortionist who worked traveling circuses when she met the tattoo artist Gus Wagner at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. Wagner wanted to learn to tattoo and exchanged a date with Gus for a lesson in tattooing, they later married. Wagner had typical tattoos of the era: patriotic symbols; monkeys; butterflies; lions; horses; snakes; trees; women and her own name tattooed on her left arm.
Wagner learned how to create ‘hand-poked’ tattoos and became a tattooist herself. Together with her husband and daughter, they were some of the last tattoo artists to create ‘hand-poked’ tattoos without the use of modern tattoo machines. Wagner was the United States’ first known female tattoo artist.
Maud and Gus Wagner left the circus and travelled around the United States, working as tattoo artists and “tattooed attractions” in vaudeville houses, county fairs and amusement arcades. The Wagners are credited with bringing tattoo artistry inland, away from the coastal cities and towns where the practice had begun.
Wagner’s legacy lived on in her daughter Lotteva, who started tattooing at the age of nine and went on to become a career tattoo artist. Lotteva she had no tattoos herself, Wagner had forbidden her husband to tattoo Lotteva and she felt that if her father couldn’t tattoo her – no one could.