 honourable. No wonder, then, that like genteel
tailors, they rated their services very high; so much so, that none but those
belonging to the higher classes could afford to employ them. So true was this,
that the elegance of one's tattooing was in most cases a sure indication of
birth and riches.
    Professors in large practice lived in spacious houses, divided by screens of
tappa into numerous little apartments, where subjects were waited upon in
private. The arrangement chiefly grew out of a singular ordinance of the Taboo,
which enjoined the strictest privacy upon all men, high and low, while under the
hands of a tattooer. For the time, the slightest intercourse with others is
prohibited, and the small portion of food allowed is pushed under the curtain by
an unseen hand. The restriction with regard to food is intended to reduce the
blood, so as to diminish the inflammation consequent upon puncturing the skin.
As it is, this comes on very soon, and takes some time to heal; so that the
period of seclusion generally embraces many days, sometimes several weeks.
    All traces of soreness vanished, the subject goes abroad; but only again to
return; for, on account of the pain, only a small surface can be operated upon
at once; and as the whole body is to be more or less embellished by a process so
slow, the studios alluded to are constantly filled. Indeed, with a vanity
elsewhere unheard of, many spend no small portion of their days thus sitting to
an artist.
    To begin the work, the period of adolescence is esteemed the most suitable.
After casting about for some eminent tattooer, the friends of the youth take him
to his house, to have the outlines of the general plan laid out. It behoves the
professor to have a nice eye, for a suit to be worn for life should be well cut.
    Some tattooers, yearning after perfection, employ, at large wages, one or
two men of the commonest order - vile fellows, utterly regardless of
appearances, upon whom they first try their patterns and practice generally.
Their backs remorselessly scrawled over, and no more canvas remaining, they are
dismissed, and ever after go about, the scorn of their countrymen.
    Hapless wights! thus martyred in the cause of the Fine Arts.
    Besides the regular practitioners, there are a parcel of shabby, itinerant
tattooers, who, by virtue of their calling, stroll unmolested from one hostile
bay to another, doing their work dog-cheap for the multitude. They always repair
to the various religious festivals, which gather great crowds
