.TATTOO.ART.
We probably have a minor accident to thank for the creation of the first tattoos. Imagine primitive man sitting beside a fire. He has a long scratch on his forearm from hunting in the forest earlier that day. The scratch itches and he rubs at it with his hand, unaware that his palm is dirty with soot and ash from the fire. A couple of days later, the wound has healed and he notices that a permanent mark has been left just below his skin. Thus, the tattoo was born.
For a long time, it was widely accepted that the Polynesian people invented the tattoo some 5000 years ago, on islands dotted around the South Pacific and thousands of miles from the nearest Continents. The practice is then believed to have spread throughout Polynesia, reaching New Zealand in the south and Samoa in the north.
Some say it this region and the tools that the Polynesians used that gave tattoo its name, and that the word itself originates from the Samoan word, ‘tatau’ which literally means balanced or fitting. Others say that the word comes from the sound that the hand tool makes when it strikes the needle stick.
But all these theories were shattered in 1991 when, on a mountain on the border between Austria and Italy, a frozen body was discovered. It was the oldest human ever found; a man, fifty-three hundred years old, with flesh and organs, fingers and toes all intact. The discovery turned out to be probably the most remarkable event in the history of human science, Otzi the Iceman.
Otzi’s skin was covered in over fifty tattoos. Some experts have speculated that these tattoos were the markings of a shaman, a religious leader, and that the corpse belonged to a human sacrifice.
Otzi’s skin was covered in over fifty tattoos. Some experts have speculated that these tattoos were the markings of a shaman, a religious leader, and that the corpse belonged to a human sacrifice.
Some of the earliest tattoos date back to Egypt during the time of the construction of the Great Pyramids. And when the Ancient Egyptians expanded their empire, the art of tattooing expanded with them. The civilizations of Greece, Crete, Persia, and Arabia also picked up on the trend and spread the art form even further. In the West, tattoos were used by the early Britons in all kinds of ceremonies while the Saxon, Danish, and Norse cultures incorporated tattoos as family crests, a tradition which still carries on today.
Tattooing in mainland Europe was banned by Pope Adrian I in 787 AD. But the practice still thrived in Britain right up until the Norman invasion of 1066. The Normans despised tattoos, and between the 12th and the 16th centuries, were instrumental in the fact that the art more or less vanished from Western culture.
These days, tattoos are applied with a tattoo gun, the prototype of which was designed by the famous American inventor, Thomas Eddison. The basic machine was invented in 1876 and is called the ‘autographic printer’; it was essentially an engraving device.
A few years later, a man named Samuel O’Reilly modified the machine to inject ink into the skin and shortly after that, he also patented the tube and needle system to provide an ink reservoir. Still, it wasn’t until 1891 that tattooing really became popular in the US and Chatham Square in New York City, where the world’s first professional tattoo artist, Martin Hildebrandt set up his studio. It is nowadays considered to be the birthplace of the American style tattoo.
It used to be the school of thought that only gangs, criminals, and sailors got tattoos. But then, in the 1970’s, everything changed. Famous rock musicians such as The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin made tattoos cool, and body ink rapidly grew in popularity across the country, and the rest of the industrial world.