Back in the ancient world, all sorts of people were inked up. Ötzi the Iceman, preserved in an Alps glacier for over 5,000 years prior to being found by hikers, had 61 tattoos on his wrist, legs, back and torso. A male mummy from Predynastic Egypt, who lived around the same time as Ötzi, sported upper-arm tattoos of what’s believed to be a wild ox and a Barbary sheep, while a female counterpart had S-shaped curves on her shoulder. And in Peru, a roughly 4,000-year-old Chinchorro mummy featured a pencil-thin tattoo mustache.
In fact, the practice of tattooing may have arisen independently on all six inhabited continents.
“Tattoos have probably existed in most places at most times, at least in some members of a population,” Nina Jablonski, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Penn State University and author of Skin: A Natural History, tells HISTORY in an email.
“People are observant,” Jablonski adds. “It would have been common for people to get charcoal under their skin accidentally, and for some to realize that they could take advantage of this to make deliberate, permanent marks on their skin.”
Writings as early as the 3rd century mention Japanese tattoos, and records of Chinese tattoos date back even further. Many pre-Columbian Native Americans likewise tattooed their bodies, with the Cree, for example, developing traditional chin tattoos.
In Utah, meanwhile, researchers unearthed a 2,000-year-old tattooing implement, and in Greenland 500-year-old Inuit mummies have been discovered with facial lines, dots and arches. Other peoples who practiced tattooing include the ancient Nubians, Filipinos, Britons and Mayans.
Ancient Greek Tattoos Honored Gods
Despite a stigma against them, the ancient Greeks sometimes tattooed themselves—Ptolemy IV, for instance, a Greek Macedonian ruler of Egypt, purportedly got inked with ivy leaves to honor the god Dionysus—and they also catalogued other civilizations with body art. Around 450 B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that for the Scythians and Thracians tattoos were a mark of nobility.
Herodotus wrote of an alleged tyrant in present-day Turkey who tattooed a secret message onto the head of a slave, which could only be read by shaving the slave’s hair. Centuries later, the ancient Romans purportedly named a people in present-day Scotland the Picts, or “painted ones,” due to their tattoos.
During the Middles Ages, some Crusaders tattooed a cross on their hands or arms, and extensive tattooing was practiced among Polynesians, from whom the word “tattoo” originated.
Ancient, But Sophisticated Tattoos
Ancient tattoos could be of very high quality. A study, published January 13, 2025, in the journal PNAS, analyzed more than 100 mummies from the Chancay civilization, which formed around A.D. 900 in present-day Peru and was later absorbed into the Inca Empire. Several of these mummies were found to have extremely detailed tattoos, with lines as narrow as 0.1 to 0.2 mm, which is thinner than those made by modern tattoo needles.
“For us, that was kind of nuts,” says study co-author Michael Pittman, a paleobiologist and archeologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “We didn’t realize the level of sophistication that went into these.”
Pittman says the tattoos were probably made with a cactus needle or sharpened animal bone. Some were of geometric shapes, such as interlocking triangles and diamonds, whereas others depicted floral designs. One chest tattoo appears to be of a monkey.
For a particularly intricate forearm tattoo, “the person would have been sitting there for quite a long time,” and the person doing it would have been “a very masterful tattoo artist,” Pittman says. “The way it’s done is very, very beautiful.”
He explains that the Chancay tattoos appear to have “individualized elements,” representing “what’s important to that person, which you also get with modern tattoos.”
Although some tattoos can be seen easily on mummies, others must be located with infrared imaging. For the study, Pittman and his three co-authors (none of whom have any tattoos themselves) went a step further. Using lasers, they made the mummified skin essentially glow in the dark to counteract the effects of fading and bleeding and reveal the tattoos in greater detail.
Pittman and colleague Thomas G. Kaye had previously employed this technique on dinosaur fossils and Roman artifacts, but no one had ever used it to view tattoos on human remains, Pittman says.
Tattoo Meanings
Pittman isn’t yet sure why the Chancay got tattoos. It could have been for a variety of reasons. As Jablonski points out, some ancient tattoos may have been therapeutic, akin to acupuncture, as was possibly the case with Ötzi. Others seemingly served as status symbols or talismans, or were part of religious rituals. Still more may have represented affiliation with a particular group or clan, entry into adulthood, success in battle or individual self-expression.
Tattoos have also been employed for darker purposes. The ancient Greeks and Romans marked criminals and slaves with tattoos. In certain cases, the Japanese mandated a single line across the forehead for a first criminal offense, an arch for a second offense and another line for a third offense, thus completing the symbol for “dog.” The Nazis infamously tattooed numbers onto the forearms of Holocaust victims.
Not every society embraces tattoos. They were banned by the Roman Emperor Constantine, and observant Jews and Mormons, among other religious groups, have generally shunned them. “Tattoos have been out of fashion for some groups of people when they were considered to violate specific religious injunctions or when they were seen to be associated with lower or criminal classes,” Jablonski explains.
Today, tattoos are more popular than ever in certain parts of the world, including the United States, where about one-third of adults have at least one, according to a 2023 survey. Many people with tattoos have little idea they are participating in an ancient practice.
Thus far, the oldest known tattoos belong to Ötzi, who lived between 3350 and 3100 B.C., and to the pair of Predynastic Egyptian mummies, who lived between 3351 and 3017 B.C. Nonetheless, researchers believe that tattoos likely long pre-date them, and may even pre-date civilization itself.
“If there’s an even older caveman preserved in a block of ice somewhere, my bet would be we’d probably find some tattoos,” Pittman says. Humans have been wearing jewelry and making art for tens of thousands of years. From there, Pittman says, “it’s a very short step to using your skin as the canvass of expression.”
Ancient Empires
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