Tattoo

In the 20th century, tattoo art throughout most of the world was associated with a limited selection of specific "rugged" lifestyles, notably sailors and prisoners.

[citation needed] British anthropologist Ling Roth in 1900 described four methods of skin marking and suggested they be differentiated under the names "tatu", "moko", "cicatrix" and "keloid".

The fourth and the last is scarification by irritating and re-opening a preexisting wound, and re-scarification to form a raised scar as found in places including Tasmania, Australia,[clarification needed] Melanesia and Central Africa.

Simple visual examinations, as well as more advanced digital recognition technologies, are employed to assist in identifying or providing clues about suspects or victims of crimes.

Branding is used for similar reasons and is often performed without anesthesia, but is different from tattooing as no ink or dye is inserted during the process, the mark instead being caused by permanent scarring of the skin.

[31] Medical tattoos are used to ensure instruments are properly located for repeated application of radiotherapy and for the areola in some forms of breast reconstruction.

It was one of the early technologies developed by the Proto-Austronesians in Taiwan and coastal South China prior to at least 1500 BCE, before the Austronesian expansion into the islands of the Indo-Pacific.

[50][51] The earliest figural tattoos were identified on the naturally mummified human remains of a male buried within a shallow grave from Gebelein in upper Egypt, and radiocarbon dated to around 3351-3017 BCE.

[53] Bes, a dwarfed god, is often associated with fertility and childbirth, and was a popular image tattooed onto women both in Egypt and Nubia, as seen in both iconographic examples, such as tomb paintings, and on human remains.

Marco Polo wrote of Quanzhou, "Many come hither from Upper India to have their bodies painted with the needle in the way we have elsewhere described, there being many adepts at this craft in the city".

At least three of the main characters – Lu Zhishen, Shi Jin (史進), and Yan Ching (燕青) – in the classic novel Water Margin are described as having tattoos covering nearly all of their bodies.

In addition, Chinese legend claimed the mother of Yue Fei (a famous Song general) tattooed the words "Repay the Country with Pure Loyalty" (精忠報國, jing zhong bao guo) down her son's back before he left to join the army.

[58] In 1691, William Dampier brought to London a Filipino man named Jeoly or Giolo from the island of Mindanao (Philippines) who had a tattooed body.

[59] It is commonly held that the modern popularity of tattooing stems from Captain James Cook's three voyages to the South Pacific in the late 18th century.

Certainly, Cook's voyages and the dissemination of the texts and images from them brought more awareness about tattooing (and, as noted above, imported the word "tattow" into Western languages).

[62] Banks was a highly regarded member of the English aristocracy who had acquired his position with Cook by co-financing the expedition with ten thousand pounds, a very large sum at the time.

In turn, Cook brought back with him a tattooed Raiatean man, Omai, whom he presented to King George and the English Court.

For example, James Ross in the Hobart Almanac of 1833 describes how the convicts on board ship commonly spent time tattooing themselves with gunpowder.

There are several large tattoo conventions held in Australia, some of which are considered the biggest in the southern hemisphere, with the best artists from around Oceania attending.

The Gond people of central India and Warli tribe of Maharashtra also practiced tattooing, which represented their cultural heritage and connection to nature.

Its presence there is stable, but in the long term (decades) the pigment tends to migrate deeper into the dermis, accounting for the degraded detail of old tattoos.

In head-hunting societies, like the Ifugao and Dayak people, tattoos were records of how many heads the warriors had taken in battle, and were part of the initiation rites into adulthood.

[107] Among the Visayans of the pre-colonial Philippines, tattoos were worn by the tumao nobility and the timawa warrior class as permanent records of their participation and conduct in maritime raids known as mangayaw.

[123] Current cultural understandings of tattoos in Europe and North America have been greatly influenced by long-standing stereotypes based on deviant social groups in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Reports were given that family members who were not accepting of tattoos wanted to scrub the images off, pour holy water on them or have them surgically removed.

's Smokehouse, a barbecue restaurant located in Massachusetts, offered customers free meals for life if they had the logo of the establishment tattooed on a visible part of their bodies.

Because it requires breaking the immunologic barrier formed by the skin, tattooing carries health risks, including infection and allergic reactions.

[140] In 2017, researchers from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France found that some of the chemicals in tattoo ink accumulate in the lymph nodes, obstructing their ability to fight infections.

Dermatological publications report that allergic reactions to natural henna are very rare and the product is generally considered safe for skin application.

While the FDA has received some accounts of minor skin irritation, including redness and swelling, from this type of temporary tattoo, the agency has found these symptoms to be "child specific" and not significant enough to support warnings to the public.