Long gone are the days when, if a girl said “I have a tattoo” you would assume that she meant a butterfly tramp stamp, or her ex-boyfriend’s name on her bosom. Tattoos are becoming much more prevalent in today’s society and they are a beautiful way to express yourself. Everyone should consider getting a tattoo. I am a girl and I have two tattoos. And I love them both. First time, the idea of getting a tattoo scared me and I was 100% sure my body will never be tattooed. But I was wrong. I’ve changed my style and my friends, I’ve changed my health and my body. Now I have three earrings and two piercings.
But my tattoos means the world to me. I decided to do my first tattoo in the end, and when I say end I mean the beginning of my new me. The delta sign with one gap means that I am open to changes. The word “elysian;” means anything that is creative, deeply inspired, absolute, perfect and the “;” means that life is not over yet.
If you have been on the fence about whether or not to get that tattoo, hopefully these reasons will be able to convince you to get inked.
Thinking of getting a tattoo? Decoration your birthday suit would add another personal story to a history of tattoos stretching back at least 8.000 years.
Mummies got tattooed
Tattooed mummies from around the world attest to the universality of body modification across the millennia and to the fact that you really were stuck with it forever if your civilization never get around to invention laser removal.
A mummy from the Chinchorror culture in pre-Incan Peru has a mustache tattooed on his upper lip. Otzi, mummified iceman of the Alps, has patterned charcoal tats along his spine, behind his knee and around his ankles, which might be from an early sort of acupuncture. The mummy of Amunet, a priestess in Middle Kingdom Egypt, features thought to symbolize sexuality and fertility.
Even older than the mummies, figurines of seemingly tattooed people and tools possibly used for tattooing date back tens of thousands of years.
A little etymology
Tattoos don’t have one historical origin point that we know of, but why do English speakers call them all tattoos?
The word is in Anglophonic modification of “tatao”, a Polynesian word used in Tahiti, where English captain James Cook landed in 1769 and encountered heavily tattooed men and women. Stories of Cook’s findings and the tattoos his crew acquired cemented our usage of “tattoo” over previous words like “scarring”, “painting” and “staining” and sparked a craze in Victorian English high society.
We might think of Victorians having Victorian attitudes about such a risque thing and you can find such sentiments and even bans, on tattooing throughout history. But while publicly some Brits looked down their noses at tattoos, behind closed doors and away from their noses, lots of people had them.
Reputedly, Queen Victoria had a tiger fighting a python and tattoos became very popular among Cook’s fellow soldiers, who used them to note their travels. You crossed the Atlantic? Get an anchor. Been south of the Equator? Time for your turtle tat. But Westerners sported tattoos long before meeting the Samoans and Maori of the South Pacific. Crusaders got the Jerusalem Cross so if they died in battle, they would get a Christian burial.
Roman soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall had military tattoos and called the Picts beyond it “Picts” for the pictures painted on them.
There’s also a long tradition of people being tattooed unwillingly. Greeks and Romans tattooed slaves and mercenaries to discourage escape and desertions.
Criminals in Japan were tattooed as such as far back the 7th century. Most infamously, the Nazis tattooed numbers on the chest or arms or Jews and other prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to identify stripped corpses. But tattoos forced on prisoners and outcasts can be redefined as people take ownership or that status or history.
to be continued
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