Excerpt from 388 Tattoos of Captain George – and the 389 Tales of How He Got Them

On May 10, 1876, the steamship Suevia left Hamburg, Germany for its regularly-scheduled voyage to New York. At 360 feet long and forty-one feet wide, with four decks, she was one of Germany’s largest passenger vessels – and one of the newest of the Hamburg America Line.1 Six hundred third-class passengers were packed into small cabins below decks, but for the 170 passengers able to afford a first- or second-class cabin, the Suevia was a comfortable floating hotel.

Up in one of the second-class cabins was a man traveling under the name Georg Constantinos, described on the ship’s manifest as a forty-six-year-old merchant from Vienna. This was not his first ocean voyage, but it was one of the most important of his life.

On the fifteen-day voyage across the Atlantic, it is most likely that Constantinos kept to his stateroom as much as he could. He was a distinctive man who often attracted unwanted attention. At five feet, nine inches tall and often described as well-fed, he was tall and stout in a time when poor nutrition kept many people short and lean. He had a thick, bushy beard, and his long, dark hair was often braided and wound around the top of his head. But his hair and beard didn’t quite hide the fact that his face was covered in blue and red tattoos. His cheeks, his forehead, and even his scalp had been inked with elaborate designs.