All traces lead us to believe that the practice of marking the body is as old as humanity itself. It is not known for sure when the practice began, one of the oldest records was detected in the famous Iceman, a mummy approximately 5,300 years old discovered in 1991 in the Alps.
Some blue lines marked on his body may be the oldest trace of a tattoo ever found or scars from some medicinal treatment adopted by Stone Age peoples. Female Egyptian mummies, such as Amunet, who would have lived between 2160 and 1994 BC, have traces and dots written on the abdomen, thus indicating that tattooing, in Ancient Egypt, could be related to fertility cults.
In addition to being used in rituals, the tattoo would also serve as identification of social groups, marking prisoners, ornamentation and even as camouflage. With Christianity, the technique fell into disuse in the West and was banned.
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Such a tradition was only discovered in 1769, when the English navigator James Cook made an expedition to Polynesia and recorded the custom in his logbook: “men and women paint their bodies. In their language, they call it tatau. They inject black pigment under the skin in such a way that the line becomes indelible”.
After a hundred years, Charles Darwin would say that no nation was unaware of the art of tattooing, in fact most people on the planet practiced or had practiced some type of tattooing.
In 1891, the electric tattoo machine appears, with this the habit spread even further across Europe and the United States. Until the end of the 20th century, designed skin, until then almost exclusive to sailors and prisoners, is currently one of the most enduring fashions among young people belonging to the most different social classes.