Wagner was born in 1877, in Emporia, Kansas, to David Van Bran Stevens and Sarah Jane McGee.

[2][3] As an apprentice of her husband, Wagner learned how to give traditional "hokey-pokey" tattoos—despite the invention of the tattoo machine by Samuel O'Reilly on December 8, 1891—and became a tattooist herself.

[3] After leaving the circus, Maud and Gus Wagner traveled around the United States, working both as tattoo artists and "tattooed attractions" in vaudeville houses, county fairs and amusement arcades.

They are credited with bringing tattoo artistry inland, away from the coastal cities and towns where the practice had started.

[6] Maud Wagner died of cancer twenty years after her husband, on January 30, 1961, at her daughter's home, in Lawton, Oklahoma.