For National Tattoo Day: The Ben Corday Sesquicentennial

National Tattoo Day is July 17; the year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ben Corday (1875-1938).

Corday was a British sailor who reportedly stood somewhere between 6’8 and 7’5, and weighed around 300 lbs. He came to my attention for an accomplishment wholly other than the tattooing he was best known for. As I learned from Steve Massa’s new book on Lonesome Luke, Corday played the heavy in four Hal Roach shorts in 1916, all of them starring Harold Lloyd as Lonesome Luke. Corday had also been a professional wrestler, and performed with the sideshow of the Sells Floto Circus.

Corday’s earliest background is a little murky. His exact birthday is not known (hence our choice of National Tattoo Day to tell his story), nor is it known for certain if he was born in Singapore or in India. In either case, he would have been a British subject. At 14 he went to sea. When old enough he enlisted in the Royal Marine Corps, followed by a hitch in the Scots Guards. He fought during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). By 1912 he was in the States. In America he plied the tattooing trade in New York, San Francisco, and finally Los Angeles, Obscure in his own time, his designs remain and are very much admired and imitated by contemporary tattoo artists. Much of what is known about him today was conveyed to Lyle Tuttle orally by Bert Grimm, who know Corday. The other scuttlebutt, unsurprisingly, is that this former British sailor was fond of drink.