In the British Science Museum: Human skin tattooed with two women’s heads and a sailor, France, 1880-1920

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Images of a sailor and two women wearing hats have been tattooed on to human skin. The skin was purchased by one of Henry Wellcome’s collecting agents, Captain Johnston-Saint, in June 1929 from Dr Villette, a Parisian surgeon. Villette worked in military hospitals and collected and preserved hundreds of samples from the autopsies of French soldiers. In the late 1800s, tattoos were often seen as markers of criminal tendencies, or ‘primitiveness’.