Impressions of seeds of Färberwaid (Isatis tinctoria L.) or German indigo, of the plant family Brassicaceae, have been found on pottery in the Iron Age settlement of Heuneburg, Germany.

Melo and Rondão write that woad was known "as far back as the time of the ancient Egyptians, who used it to dye the cloth wrappings applied for the mummies.

Julius Caesar reported (in Commentarii de Bello Gallico) that the Britanni used to colour their bodies blue with vitrum, a word that means primarily 'glass', but also the domestic name for the woad (Isatis tinctoria), besides the Gaulish loanword glastum (from Proto-Celtic *glastos 'green').

Gillian Carr conducted experiments using indigo pigment derived from woad mixed with different binders to make body paint.

[17] People with modern experiences with woad as a tattoo pigment have claimed that it does not work well, and is actually caustic and causes scarring when put into the skin.

The same study also noted that the earliest definite reference to the woad plant in the British Isles dates to a seed impression on an Anglo-Saxon pot.

[23] Chaucer mentions their use by the dyer ("litestere") in his poem The Former Age:[24] The three colours can be seen together in tapestries such as The Hunt of the Unicorn (1495–1505), though typically it is the dark blue of the woad that has lasted best.

As does the late 13th century North Italian manual on book illumination Liber colorum secundum magistrum Bernardum describe its usage.

In Viking Age levels at archaeological digs at York, a dye shop with remains of both woad and madder have been excavated and dated to the 10th century.

In medieval times, centres of woad cultivation lay in Lincolnshire and Somerset in England, Jülich and the Erfurt area in Thuringia in Germany, Piedmont and Tuscany in Italy, and Gascogne, Normandy, the Somme Basin (from Amiens to Saint-Quentin), Brittany and, above all, Languedoc in France.

This last region, in the triangle created by Toulouse, Albi and Carcassonne, known as the Lauragais, was for a long time the biggest producer of woad, or pastel, as it was locally known.

[23] Much of the woad produced here was used for the cloth industry in southern France,[25] but it was also exported via Bayonne, Narbonne and Bordeaux to Flanders, the Low Countries, Italy, and above all Britain and Spain.

[26] The woad produced in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire in the 19th century was shipped out from the Port of Wisbech,[27] Spalding and Boston,[28] both the last to northern mills and the USA.

To fully understand the importance of the ford industry in the State of Urbino, it is enough to read the comprehensive Chapters of the art of wool in 1555, which dictated prescriptions regarding the cultivation and trade of woad, whether in loaves or macerated (powdered).

[31] Testifying to the importance that this crop had in the economy in addition to the archival documents was the identification of a hundred millstones surveyed by Delio Bischi in the province of Pesaro and Urbino, the original use of which had become completely unknown as their memory had been lost.

Following the Portuguese discovery of the sea route to India by the navigator Vasco da Gama in 1498, great amounts of indigo were imported from Asia.