Hamilton Street and a dancer’s calculation

Hull wrote that she was “ushered into the world 37 years ago on April 23, on a tough, tenement-choked Hamilton Street.”^[1] The street was on the Lower East Side. She attended Transfiguration Roman Catholic parochial school and Public School 117, and she left school at thirteen.^[1] Later accounts usually give the birth year as 1897; her “37 years ago” would agree with that only if the memoir was written around 1934. We give April 23 and flag the year as not fully settled.^[1][2]

She worked as a burlesque and “exotic” circus dancer. A sideshow talker told her that a full tattoo suit could earn eighty dollars a week, a figure she remembered as she weighed the change.^[1] In the same excerpt she joked that she “suffered anemia of the bankroll.”^[1] The money, not a childhood dream of the Bowery, is how she explained the decision.

Tattooed and trained by Charlie Wagner

Wagner tattooed her over about ten sessions, covering her arms, legs, thighs, sides, back and chest.^[1][3] He then taught her to tattoo.^[3] The 2016 historical marker at 11 Chatham Square calls her “New York’s only lady tattooist,” the wording of its own time.^[3] Other women, including Trixie Richardson and Stella Grassman, also tattooed; what the marker records is how unusual a woman running a Bowery shop still seemed.

In a memoir passage preserved by the Tattoo Archive, she asked, of the experience of being tattooed by men, “What does a woman do when she visits a doctor?”^[1] The line is dry, and it is one of the few first-person remarks we have from a woman on that side of the needle in 1930s New York.

In 1939 the painter Ace Harlyn made an oil of Wagner tattooing her. It was later shown in the New-York Historical Society’s Tattooed New York exhibition. The painting is in a private collection and is not reproduced here.^[5][6]

The Tattoo Emporium at 16 Bowery

Around 1939 she opened her Tattoo Emporium inside a barbershop at 16 Bowery.^[3][4] A marker inset names the room “Mildred’s Tattoo Studio at 16 Bowery” and shows a partner, Tommy Lee.^[3] Her business card in our archive is plain and direct: “Mildred Hull, Tattooist, 16 Bowery, N.Y.C.”

A 1930s postcard shows her with a square-back “Jonesy” machine. The same card calls her “Mary” and a member of the “Butterfly Club.”^[1] We have not found more about the club. The postcard is a reminder that even a well-documented life still arrives in fragments.

Film of her tattooing survives. A clip on the shop’s YouTube channel is titled “Mildred Hull Tattooing – Vintage video from 1937,” the date supplied by the uploader.^[7] It is one of the rare moving records of a Bowery tattooer at work before the 1961 ban.

August 1947

Hull died in August 1947, by poison, in a Bowery restaurant. The Tattoo Archive describes the death as a suicide.^[1][2] She was still in her forties, if the 1897 year is right, and the shop at 16 Bowery did not become a long-running family studio of the kind the Moskowitzes later built.

What remains is the record of a woman who moved from the stage to the chair, and then to the other side of the machine, in the same few blocks where Wagner and O’Reilly had worked. NYC Tourism still calls her the “Queen of the Bowery.”^[4] The title is later, and it fits the way the street remembered her.

NYC Tattoo Shop is at 141 Canal St, a short walk from 16 Bowery. The history here belongs to New York. We’re proud to work nearby.

Photo gallery

Photographs, a business card and a film still from the NYC Tattoo Shop History Digital Archive. The 1937 date on the footage is the uploader’s date.