Tattoos and Scarification

Kyle Ann Huskin

Humans will write on any surface they can get their hands on – including their own bodies. Tattoos are permanent designs produced by inserting pigment into the skin’s dermis layer and letting the wound heal. Scarification, including cutting and branding or burning, leaves designs on the body without the use of pigments (‘Scarification’). Existing on a kind of ‘living parchment’, tattoos resist neat categorisation as written artefacts: they can be documentary or literary writing, representational or abstract images, or a combination of text and image, and their many purposes can include personal taste, identity communication, and cultural significance (Martell and Larsen 2022, 1–4). 

The modern term ‘tattoo’ is a loanword from a Polynesian language (cf. Samoan tatau ‘to strike’, ‘tattoo’), which entered the English lexicon in the 18th-century after Captain James Cook reported back from his travels (‘Tattooing’). The practice of tattooing, however, has existed all over the world and long predates Cook’s encounter with it. The oldest evidence of tattoos comes from Ötzi, who died over 5,300 years ago in the Italian Alps and whose thawing, mummified body was discovered by hikers in 1991; later analysis found over sixty tattoos on his body (Samadelli et al. 2015). Tattoos have also been found on female Egyptian mummies dating from the 21st Dynasty (c.1077–943 BCE); the designs and placements correspond to designs made on clay figurines (Austin and Gobeil 2017), and further analysis suggests that the tattoos were intended to protect the wearers during childbirth (Austin and Arnette 2022). Tattooing also has a long history in the Americas, having been documented by the 16th-century Spanish missionary Peter Martyr d’Anghiera in Central America (MacNutt 1912, 405); found on mummified remains of a woman who died c.200–500 CE in Alaska (Smith and Zimmerman 1975); and attested in ethnographic and ethnohistorical accounts of many tribes in the southeastern United States (Peres and Deter-Wolf 2016, 109). 

The most common tattooing pigment used across cultures is carbon black, although the 6th-century Byzantine physician Aëtius of Amida provides a recipe for an iron-gall tattoo ink (de Groot 2016, 7). The carbonaceous material can be visualised well with infrared reflectography (IRR) and multispectral imaging (MSI) (Samadelli et al. 2015; Austin and Arnette 2022). Microscopy and spectroscopy have been used to analyse use-wear patterns and pigment presence on replicas of ancient tools that could have functioned as tattoo needles (Deter-Wolf and Peres 2013). XRF could potentially be used to determine the source of carbon (whether bone char or soot) by identifying trace metals and minerals. Inasmuch as it lacks pigments, scarification would be difficult, if not impossible, to analyse with materials analysis tools.