When Did Women's Tattoos Become Popular
Tattoo on an ancient Egyptian female mummy / Creative Commons
For thousands of years, tattoos have been indicative of the passage from girlhood to womanhood, of female power and female beauty.
Past Emily Poelina-Hunter / 06.01.2017
Lecturer in the Indigenous Studies Unit
RMIT University
Almost a quarter of Australian women at present accept tattoos – a trend some attribute to the influence of feminism. What I find interesting is that the mainstreaming of female tattooing in the west has finally caught up with a practice that is thousands of years onetime.
Ancient Egyptian female person mummies have been plant with tattoos. Thracian women were depicted with "sleeve" tattoos on their arms in Greek vases from the 5th century BCE. In traditional Maori culture, the eldest girl in elite families was tattooed equally part of a sacred anniversary.
I take also been researching abstract painted motifs on nude female Cycladic sculptures, which I argue are evidence that women were tattooed in the Cycladic islands in Hellenic republic in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000-2000 BCE).
Portrait of a Maori woman, Mrs Rabone. Google Art Project/Wikimedia Commons
My interest in tattooing stems from my upbringing. Living in Aotearoa, from roughly the ages of eight to 28, meant that I was exposed to Maori and Pacific Islands tattooing attitudes. In Pacific cultures, where the tattooist has traditionally been (and usually continues to be) male, ancient stories say that the ancestral gods originally wanted women to safeguard the practice and be the main recipients of tattoos. Withal, both men and women were tattooed in Maori social club prior to British colonisation in the 19th century.
Merely the Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907 criminalised tattooing equally i of the teachings and practices of Tohunga (Maori experts or priests). In 1962, the Maori Welfare Act was introduced in Aotearoa, repealing this human activity. Since so, there has been a resurgence in tattooing among both men and women in that location.
My first seven tattoos
I grew up with friends who appreciated the significance of tattoos. As soon I turned 18, in 2000, I was off to a local parlour to encompass legal adulthood and get a pocket-sized tattoo. I had fatigued it myself, using elements of my zodiac sign.
My 2nd tattoo was my start mermaid design. The motif was a larger version of a charm my father had given me. I wanted to be like that mermaid – able to live in unlike environments (above the ocean and below it). I had moved out of home and was making my own fashion in a new city and attending university.
The author'south commencement seven tattoos. Author provided
My next five designs ("Are You Experienced"; "Electric Lady"; and "Axis Assuming equally Beloved", and two large mermaids on each side of my dorsum) were done by a Maori tattooist, Manu Edwin. I listened to a lot of Hendrix when I was dealing with low every bit an undergraduate student, especially the 3 albums recorded past The Experience.
Edwin shared my philosophy that tattooing is a transformative procedure. He would play each anthology loudly in the studio as he was tattooing me – merely every bit music and singing were traditionally used to drown out the "tap-tap" of tattoos being carved into the peel with hand held tools in the Pacific region.
I find that the concrete pain of being tattooed puts emotional and mental pain into perspective. I love that the raw tattoo must be cared for gently in the following weeks after the procedure, and that the result is permanent. My tattoos turn something ugly from my past into something beautiful for my present and future.
Before I describe my eighth and most contempo tattoo, let's expect at four ancient cultures that tattooed their women.
Maori (ca.1250 CE)
A Maori woman of high rank photographed circa 1908. Internet Volume archive/Flickr
Elsdon All-time was an ethnographer who gathered detailed information from the Tuhoe tribe (from the North Island of Aotearoa) in the very early 1900s. He recounts in his volume, The Uhi-Maori (1904), that elite families tattooed the younger sisters prior to the tattooing of the eldest one, who was the most tapu (sacred).
The tattooing of the lips and chin of the first-born daughter of a chief was extremely tapu, and the rite was called ahi ta ngutu (sacred fire). During the tattooing, others from the tribe would surround the patient and sing specific whakatangitangi (repetitive songs) to ease the painful and highly sacred process, the song for women being the whakawai taanga ngutu.
The motifs of the tattoo would be adamant by an individual's genealogy, and the placement of tattoos on the body was significant. People without tattoos were papatea (unmarked, and thus of lower status), and to be tattooed was a sign of bewitchery and high status in the community.
Thracian (ca.500 BCE)
Thrace of the Greco-Roman world existed in what nosotros at present call east Republic of macedonia, southeast Republic of bulgaria and parts of Turkey. Pictorial representations of Thracian women with tattoos appear on Greek red-figure vases such every bit the ane pictured here, with a Thracian woman attacking Orpheus.
Thracian woman attacking Orpheus. Appointment: Classical, 475–425 BCE. Dimensions: Unknown. Provenance: South Italia. Electric current collection: Munich. Antikensammlung inv. number 2330
Luc Renaut, an art historian, suggests that in Thrace, tattooing added beauty, and therefore value, to women in a society where they were bought for marriage (that is, they incurred a bride toll). This was in dissimilarity to the Classical Greek and Roman systems in which the bride's family gave payments (a dowry) to the groom's family unit.
Depictions of women on Classical vases (ca. 500 BCE), show Thracian women with geometric and figurative tattoos. The tattoos reinforce the Thracian-ness of the adult female in the scene. And indicate that she is not your run-of-the-mill Athenian lass who tin't stand the lyre.
Greek vase painting gives a visual account of the geometric and figurative motifs on Thracian women: zigzags, dots, lines, meanders, checkerboard patterns, spirals, ladder patterns, "stick-figure" animals, half-moons, rayed suns, and rosettes.
Tattoos were placed on the arms, legs, ankles, breast, neck, and mentum. Sometimes entire arms or legs were covered with bands of designs, row upon row.
Egyptian (Eleventh Dynasty: 2040-1991 BCE)
Much older artistic (and direct) evidence of female tattooing comes from Egypt. Egyptian tattoos from the belatedly third to early 2nd millennium survive on female mummies and were replicated on female figurines.
A pair of Eleventh Dynasty female Egyptian mummies excavated at Deir el-Bahari is the strongest evidence that in the Eye Kingdom, Egyptian women were tattooed.
Alastair Pharo, later on Hendrix 2003,Author provided
The preserved "dotted diamond" tattoo motif is clearly visible on the arm of one of the mummies. The aforementioned motif can exist seen on Egyptian potency figurines from the aforementioned site and menstruum.
Dancing girl Egyptian potency figurine. Past Alastair Pharo, after Winlock 1923, Fig. 15
The hitting similarity between the painted motifs on the figurine and the preserved tattoos on the female mummy are compelling evidence that cultures that tattooed their women produced female figures with tattoos painted on their bodies.
Egyptian tattooing kits consisted of iii items institute in the archaeological record. These are razors, needles or pins, and small containers of dried carbon based black paint. All of these elements of the basic tattooing kit (not only in Arab republic of egypt just around the globe) are multifunctional items. They could exist useful for not-permanent body modification: shaping eyebrows, using black eyeliner. Needles and pins could exist used to stitch clothing, pop pimples, or remove splinters.
Ancient people were very resourceful, and tattooing is very basic. At the core of the procedure is pricking the skin and getting some paint into the wound. The process of prick-tattooing by hand is reflected by the representation of the diamond pattern on both the mummified tattoo and on the authority figurine shown here.
Today the cluster of needles on an electrical tattooing car are and so small that y'all can't differentiate the dots: a mechanism moves the needles up and down extremely quickly. Only in 2000 BCE, tattooing in Egypt was done with atypical pointed implements or a few pins bound together held in the hand of the tattooist, using their wrist force to repeatedly poke a motif into the pare.
The points may have been dipped into an ink beforehand and it is likely that afterwards the whole area would exist rubbed with more ink for good measure out to endeavour and get a articulate, dark terminal upshot.
Cycladic (ca.2500 BCE)
The Cycladic people (ca. 3000-2000 BCE) colonised the Cycladic Islands. They were the outset major Aegean civilization to flourish in the Early Bronze Age, until the Minoans of Crete rose to prominence with their maritime prowess in the Centre Bronze Age (ca. 2000-1500 BCE). The mortuary practices of Cycladic people (burial, sometimes multiple burials) and the climatic conditions of the islands, means that there are no preserved tattooed peel remains to support my statement that their women were tattooed.
Nevertheless, like their southern Mediterranean Egyptian neighbours, they produced nude female figures with geometric designs across the face and body. This is where the iconographic evidence of the "tattooed" Cycladic figurines aligns with Egyptian female tattooing evidence.
Furthermore, I take identified objects in the Cycladic archaeological repertoire which are nowadays in the Egyptian tattooing kits – small containers of preserved pigment, obsidian blades to shave the skin, and needles and pins made of os and metal.
Tattooed Cycladic figure. Past Alastair Pharo, later Hendrix
These items are also useful beyond the body modification sphere too – butchering, cooking, crafting, espionage – I could go along. Merely my point (pun intended) is that people should include tattooing in the listing of possible uses for these items.
The painted Cycladic figurines and statues that constitute my creative evidence are probably the most well known artefacts of this culture. However, their abstruse painted decoration was not fully realised until fine art conservator Elizabeth Hendrix's research in the 1990s and early 2000s. Under special photographic conditions, she found faint traces of crimson, blue, and black paint (sometimes noticeable with the naked eye) were revealed to be the remains of a colourful array of abstruse painted motifs. These include: dots, zigzags, stripes, eyes, and possibly linear representations of the Egyptian deity, Bes.
To me, the most enigmatic Cycladic tattoo motif is the eye. Blueish evil eye charms are still a potent adept luck symbol in the Mediterranean and Almost Due east. You lot can see it on the neck of the case shown here.
Cycladic culture was an oral ane that did non create it own script and leave whatsoever written cluesper se. Instead their cultural ideas are inscribed on the sculptures. I read their designs as tattoos, which identified their bearers equally women who had accomplished a certain status in Cycladic gild.
My eighth tattoo
I chose a blue evil eye equally my 8th, and most recent tattoo motif – to pay homage to the eye painted on Cycladic female person sculptures. It was done by a female person tattooist in Athens on my last research trip to Greece in 2014.
The power of female fertility and perils of prehistoric childbirth in aboriginal societies probably meant that tattoos on women conveyed sure messages. They were indicative of the passage from girlhood to womanhood, of female power and female person beauty.
Writer's eighth tattoo – a blue evil eye. Author provided
If I see my tattoos as permanent records of rites of passage and ability over arduousness, ancient women and their societies may accept been doing the same – but with a more restricted range of motif options. The limited range of motifs would have been due to both social conventions, the skill of the tattooist, and the tools used to create the tattoo.
Next time you see a piece written virtually female tattooing today, I hope y'all will wonder at how feminism, globalisation and tattooing accept taken and then long to come up total circle. Over again, women are at present the master recipients of this ancient, permanent trunk modification do.
Originally published by The Conversation under a Creative Eatables Attribution/No derivatives license.
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