Kansas Tattoo Artist's Banner Discovery Revives Story of Maud Stevens Wagner

Dolecek said the customer told him he had found the banner in an abandoned farmhouse near Cedar Point, Kansas, while exploring with friends. Upstairs, the group found steamer trunks full of tattoo memorabilia, including tools, pigments, flash designs and sideshow banners. The customer realized he had found something significant, Dolecek said.

Dolecek recognized the woman on the banner as Maud Stevens Wagner. The banner had been painted years earlier to entice carnival visitors to see a sensational spectacle. Dolecek was captivated. "I'm instantly doing the math in my head, like; Who can I call? Where can I borrow money?" he said. "Because this is not leaving my shop."

Wagner was born in Emporia, Kansas. At a time when women could not vote and career options were limited, she forged her own path as an entertainer and artist. She became one of the most recognizable women in early American tattooing.

A striking 1907 photograph shows Wagner sitting elegantly with her tattoos on full display. A woman riding a lion appears on her chest, and her arms display a riot of creatures, with Kansas sunflowers peeking out on each elbow. The image is among the most downloaded tattoo-related images in the Library of Congress. Alan Govenar, an author and filmmaker who published three books on the Wagner family, said the photograph has a Mona Lisa quality. "She's so beautifully tattooed," Govenar said. "There's something intensely evocative about this photo."

Nora Stevens was in her early 20s when she changed her name to Maud and hit the road with her older sister, Dora. The pair performed together as the Stevens Sisters, singing in sideshow skits and performing in a high-wire act with a traveling circus and variety show.

When Maud Stevens was 26, she met Gus Wagner, a charismatic showman who billed himself as a professional globe-trotter, world champion hand tattoo artist and tattooed man. According to Govenar's research, Gus Wagner learned his technique, called hand poke or stick and poke, from tattoo masters in Japan, Java and Borneo during four years as a merchant seaman. He later said his tattoos told the story of his life on his breast, a history of America on his back and the romance of the sea on each arm.

Dolecek said he heard Stevens met Wagner beneath the newly electrified lights at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. According to legend, they traded a lesson in tattooing for a first date and hit it off right away. Derin Bray, who runs an auction house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and studies tattoo history, said the story is just legend. "It's a great story, exchanging a tattoo for a date," Bray said. "But it's not true." Bray found photographs of the pair dated at least a year before the World's Fair. Their marriage was officially announced Oct. 3, 1904.

While the two may not have met in St. Louis, the spectacle of one of the largest World's Fairs in history would have been difficult for them to resist. A reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found the Wagners busily tattooing customers at a storefront where they had set up shop on the outskirts of the fairgrounds. Gus Wagner boasted that he made almost as much as a bank president during the fair. "It's a paying business all right, if you know how to go at it," he told the reporter. "First, you've got to know the business – how to handle the needles, how to apply them without going too deep, and above all, how to use pigments that are put and will not cause irritations. Then you've got to deliver the goods. Do it quick and have it over with."

The Wagners made their home on the road, traveling the carnival circuit and inking customers in the off-season. Dolecek said it was common at the time for tattoo shops to move around. Tattooers would take up in the back of a barber shop, or maybe a photo studio, he said. As a couple, the Wagners are credited at the turn of the century with bringing tattooing into middle America.

After performing with his wife for decades, Gus Wagner was struck by lightning in 1941 and died several months later. Maud Wagner died in 1961.