Let’s pretend I was 18 when I got my first tattoo. That’s still a considerable whack of years to have been inked.
The word tattoo means literally “a puncture, or mark made on the skin”, first noted in Captain Cook’s notes on his rampage around Polynesia. Yet tattoos can be found throughout history, as far back as civilisation itself.
One of the earliest human remains, Ötzi The Iceman, has no less than 61 tattoos all over his body. Our 5,300-year old ancestor was found freeze dried in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, and has fascinated scientists and anthropologists ever since with his eerily well-preserved skin and its snazzy inkwork. Originally, these carbon markings were assumed to have been made by rubbing soot into incisions in Ötzi’s skin, or perhaps plant matter packed into wounds and then set on fire.
Sooo glad I wasn’t cutting my inking teeth back then, if that’s what they were using.
But as with all knowledge, new insight comes from trans-disciplinary, co-arising obsessions. Last month, in fact, archaeologist Arron Deter-Wolf published the results of a 2022 study “Examining the Physical Signatures of Pre-Electric Tattooing Tools and Techniques” wherein the authors experimented with eight tools made from animal bone, obsidian, copper, and boar tusk and a modern steel needle, to create tattoos on the leg of co-author Danny Riday.
Before you sit back, aghast at the thought of archaeologists attacking each other with inky bones and tusks for the pursuit of knowledge, rest easy.
Co-authors Riday and Maya Sialuk Jacobsen hail from the field of tattoo artisans, and are long skilled in the inking industry, along with other ink-stars, Benoit Robitaille and Aurélien Burlot.
Deter-Wolf was curious as to how the lack of experiential and procedural knowledge impacted the previous theories regarding Ötzi’s body art, and that of other pre-modern mummies discovered in Greenland and The Andes.
Through a mixed method of hand poking, hand tapping, incision and subdermal tattoos, the tattoo artists spent a total of 12 hours inking the same motif onto Riday’s limb using a variety of methods posited in scientific studies.
The results were surprising. Not only did the healed skin and line thickness of the incision methods not correlate with that on the skin of Grandpa Ötzi and other pre-modern mummies, but the thicker lines of tattoos from the Greenland and Andes mummies were almost certainly not produced by subdermal methods (like the burning of the plants. Thank Goodness).
Riday’s leg seems to suggest that pre-modern tattoo methods were far more similar to our modern methods than previously suspected.
The authors note that “Just as contemporary tattoo artists use a variety of needle arrangements to address specific lining and shading needs, different tool forms and/or techniques were likely used in the past to achieve different desired effects.”
So basically, our ancestral body artists were sick at inking.
Ok, that’s the end of the history lesson. Curiously, however, that is not the end of Ötzi’s relevance to modern tattoo practices. Another, less horrific theory regarding his well-preserved skin art is that they were healing marks made to alleviate chronic pain at the joints, spine, wrist and lower legs. A sort of permanent from of acupuncture, of you will.
Recent research has revealed that the modern deluge of tattoos across the globe, including here in Middle Kingdom, may too be linked with forms of harnessing healing powers and easing pain.
Dr. David Griffin’s 2019 book “Tattoos and Trauma” explores the healing powers of tattoos in emergency responders.
First person accounts from 148 people who have worked as medical professionals, military personnel, firefighters, and police officers shed light on the restorative powers of tattoos as tangible marks of intangible trauma and PTSD.
Similar studies of late make for compelling reading on the correlation between tattoos and other forms of body art, and childhood neglect or abuse.
Of course, that’s not to say that ALL tattoos are testament to a traumatic past; many have cultural or aesthetic value and thankfully nothing at all to do with adverse life events or formative experiences.
Drawing on a research pool of over 1,000 participants in Germany, a 2022 study, published in BMC Psychology by Borkenhagen, Fegert, et al., indicates a similar correlation between trauma and the recuperation of a multifaceted loss of agency in childhood through the act of tattooing.
Agency is a feeling of control over your own actions, together with the consequences of said actions.
Turning intangible pain into something beautiful can be cathartic. The feeling of taking back control can lead to increased empowerment across a broad spectrum of life choices.
In any case, this study and others speak to the power that tattoos give to those coping with sad, bad life experiences. As a bespoke form of narrative therapy, they allow for the transformation of the unspeakable into a permanent visual reclamation of a hijacked life.
No one gets out of this life alive, and no one gets out unscathed by pain, loss and grief. Some people choose to use the body as a canvas for healing.
Grandpa Ötzi and his ilk were doing so as far back 5,300 years ago.
Whether his tattoos were spiritual or shamanic, it is impossible to say. But the skill and craft with which they were created implies that they were more than teardrops and clocks-with-no-hands from the pre-historic prisoner tattoo catalogue.
Throughout Asia, this may well have been the case, and here in China in particular, tattooing used to be a permanent mark of shame reserved for the criminal classes.
Nowadays, this cultural taboo is shifting rapidly, with a multitude of highly skilled artists pushing the boundaries of body ink aesthetics both here in Nanjing and beyond. Many of my favourite pieces have been created by one of Nanjing’s finest.
Who knows that other surprises await us in the melting ice? Not I. But it is pleasing to think that some things do not change; the human impulse to impose order and strive for betterment in times of adversity. The urge to use language to rewrite new stories and reimagine new futures.
Hopefully, for Ötzi, his tattoos gave him respite from his pain (before he was shot with an arrow and died). Hopefully, those who get inked to write a new story for themselves get the peace they seek. Hopefully, there are “No Ragrets”, as the global inking fetish looks like it’s here to stay.
