In 1862, the Prince of Wales — the future King Edward VII — visited Jerusalem and received a tattoo from the famous Coptic tattooist Souwan, continuing the centuries-old tradition of Christian pilgrims marking their bodies as proof of their journey to the Holy Land. The Prince's tattooing sparked a fashion among European aristocracy and upper classes for acquiring tattoos, transforming body modification from a marker of criminality and lower-class identity into an aristocratic curiosity. Within a decade several European royals, including Tsar Nicholas II and King George V, bore tattoos.

The royal embrace of tattooing generated widespread commentary in the British press and contributed to the decadent and aestheticist movement's fascination with the body as a site of deliberate artistic transformation. Oscar Wilde's circle and the aesthetes of the 1880s and 1890s were acutely aware of tattooing's new social mobility, and the body art of the period fed into Decadent poetry's obsession with skin, surface, and the cultivation of the self as artwork. The aristocratic tattoo also complicated Victorian poetry's moral geography of the marked versus unmarked body.