Sept. 14th, 2007; the day I visited Whitby with college.
Whitby is a place that holds sour memories for me, but I will look past this and attempt an unbiased blog.
Upon arrival I abandoned my original idea of 'myths', as the first gothic-looking building that caught my eye had been converted into a tattoo parlour.
In the windows there were sheets with drawings of tattoo stencils; stars, mermaids and roses were plastered all over the sheets. They drew me in.
Nautical tattoo art has been one of my most significant influences in my art, and finding a way to tie it in with this project, I think, is quite clever.
Upon Capt. James Cook's return from the expedition to the South Sea Islands, the people of Whitby were some of the first to see tattoos on white men. Although the tribal tattoos of the island natives had been scarcely documented, people knew of them from other sailors' voyages to islands home to cannibal natives.
Cook, himself, returned with no tattoos, but his crew did.
Tattoo art, with it's native needle and ink method, soon spread to the prisons, making the already despisable tattoos an even more 'barbaric' social mark.
I saw steel sculptures in the bays, shaped like anchors with a rope; the obvious symbol of a docked ship. There were small figurines of tattoo-style mermaids in every tacky shop, there was even a small wooden ship in someone's garden with 'The Maiden Voyage' inscribed into its side in gold..
It's plain to see that there is an obvious faux-nostalgia around Whitby as the town has been preserved in its gothic state.
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