ABSTRACT
Over the course of the nineteenth century, tattooed circus and sideshow performers used the captivity narrative to tell their story to audiences. The already popular genre in American and European publishing and performance used tales of encounters between the “civilized” and the “savage” to help Westerners wrestle with the expansion of empire and the settlement of the frontier. Tattooed performers claimed to have been captured and forcibly tattooed at the hands of natives in the American West and the South Seas, bravely surviving these life threatening encounters that left them decorated with multicolored designs and ready to tell the world.
