tattooing The tattoo

tattooing The tattoo — an indelible coloured image on the skin, is historically the most commonly practised form of permanent body decoration. Tattooing is thought to have diffused from Egypt about four thousand years ago; it has been found since then in most cultures of the world, though among dark-skinned peoples incised decoration (scarification, cicatrization) is a more common form of permanent alteration. Carved figures suggestive of tattooing survive in Egypt from 6000 bce but the physical evidence of mummified bodies dates from Middle Kingdom Egypt (c.2000 bce). Widespread archaeological and literary evidence of tattooing since the seventh century bce exists for many parts of Eurasia, and ethnographic evidence for these and other parts of the world, including the Americas, Africa, Polynesia, and New Zealand, has been collected since the sixteenth century.

The technique involves puncturing the dermis with a needle or other sharp instrument to a depth of 0.25–0.5 cm and simultaneously applying a dark pigment. The pigment rests in linear strata in the dermis; the fading and blurring of older tattoos is due to local dispersal of pigment through the lymphatic system. Small-scale needle tattoos are relatively painless, unless on sensitive areas of the body, but elaborate or semi-incised designs are a more severe ordeal. Temporary local inflammation may occur; more serious medical complications may develop where hygienic standards are poor (for example, from cross-infections through contaminated needles, or from use of harmful pigments), though more rarely than might be expected. Tattoos can be removed by various means, including dermabrasion, excision and suturing, and laser surgery, though usually with some residual scarring.

In pre-literate societies where tattooing is culturally embedded, the practice is normally highly ritualized, and alongside its decorative value it carries information about status and identity, as well as religious, therapeutic, or prophylactic significance. Designs are enormously varied in imagery and location, from the elaborate geometrical designs across arms, legs, and abdomen of Burma or the Marquesas; to the miniature stylized images of Gujarati tattooing; the elaborate curvilinear form of New Zealand moko tattooing on men, which combined incision and pigmentation to produce individually unique facial designs; or the vivid figurative images of Japanese irezumi, derived from eighteenth-century wood-block illustrations and patterned onto the body like ornate clothing. The English term ‘tattoo’ (from the Polynesian tatu/tatau — mark, strike), versions of which were adopted into other European languages, testifies to the profound significance of the eighteenth-century encounter with the Pacific cultures for the spread of tattooing in modern Europe. Alternative and older European words, carrying connotations of marking or piercing (e.g. English ‘pounce’, Dutch ‘prickschilderen’, French ‘piqûre’), suggest that tattooing must have been known in Europe before its eighteenth-century reimportation and renaming, but the extent of its survival from the Scythian, Celtic, and Germanic customs documented in classical sources (e.g. Herodotus, Tacitus) is unclear. Greeks and Romans disdained the practice as barbarian; in the Roman empire it was used only on criminals, slaves/indentured labourers, and soldiers. This outcast association was strengthened when the medieval western Church picked up and repeated the biblical proscription of body-marking (cf. Lev. 19:28). There is thus little reference to tattooing in medieval and early modern Europe — but there is scattered evidence of its popular survival within Europe or on its margins. Tattoos were certainly acquired by European crusaders and pilgrims in Jerusalem, as also by pilgrims to the medieval Italian shrine of Loreto and by Coptic Christians and Bosnian Catholics. However, decorative tattooing was largely effaced from European cultural memory before the eighteenth century, and its recurrence was marked by the absorption of a new and diverse repertoire of secular images from popular culture, many of which remain familiar today. (A similar process of cultural forgetting and marginalization seems to have occurred in Japan, where a revival of highly skilled tattoo artistry coexisted with more strenuous official attempts to suppress it in the nineteenth century.)

Even after its eighteenth-century reimportation, via European sailors, from Polynesia and New Zealand, and a brief period as an exotic novelty, tattooing retained its association with disreputability, though to differing degrees. In continental Europe, it was regarded as the habit of common soldiers, sailors, labourers, and criminals, or was displayed by fairground and freak-show entertainers. In Britain, by contrast, tattoo images were widely sported by naval and military officers, despite the fact that tattoos were also used as penal marks in the army until the 1870s; little social stigma attached to the practice, and its adoption by aristocrats and royalty helped spark a tattooing craze around the turn of the century that spread throughout Europe and the US. Britain and the US also saw the first professionalization of tattooing, the invention (1891) of an electrical tattooing machine, and the improvement of techniques and inks. This period of popularity was short-lived, however, and the 1920s–50s saw the social and aesthetic decline of tattooing in Western culture. However, since the 1960s successive periods of reinvention and expansion have given it an unprecedented prominence and visibility, and women have entered this previously largely male domain. The tattoo is currently enjoying a cultural renaissance, alongside and perhaps by contrast with other body-altering practices of scarifying, branding, and extensive piercing, which have entered modern Western culture for the first time.

Medical interest in the tattoo since the nineteenth century has included research into its anatomy and pathology, its applications in cosmetic surgery, and means of its removal. In modern scholarship, tattooing has been the province of anthropology for pre-literate societies, and of criminology, sociology, and psychology for non-tribal societies. Thus in the West it has been largely pathologized as the expression of a marginal subculture of resistance, associated especially with communities of male confinement and group identification. Only recently has this perspective shifted, and the history, ethnography, and aesthetics of tattooing in the West become more serious subjects of study.