Tattooing as body art A look at tattooing throughout the ages

Tattooing has been practised historically in a great variety of cultures throughout history, for a great variety of reasons. Tattoos have often been more than mere marks, pictures, symbols or color forms applied to the skin. In some cultures, they were symbols that marked a right of passage; in others they were marks of status or rank. Elsewhere they have been used as decorations to mark bravery, pledges of love, or fertility as well as sexual lures, as amulets, and as talismans. For modern western adolescents, tattoos have been a way of rebelling against authoritarian rules or for gaining acceptance within social groups.

Tattoos have also been used for more sinister purposes, such as identifying the wearer as property in one form or another. For example, Jews were tattooed with numbers during the Holocaust; African-American slaves were sometimes tattooed to identify their owner; convicts have often received tattooed numbers. At other times and places tattoos have served a medical purpose, disguising scars or other skin related problems. They are even used as a means to apply permanent cosmetics to the eyes or lips.

The methods of applying tattoos have also varied greatly, from the simple rubbing of cuts and other wounds with ashes, to painting designs directly onto the outer skin of the body, to hand-pricking the skin to insert dyes and other pigments into the lower dermis.