Where Does Tattooing Come From?

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Shotsie Gorman. I am here as a tattoo artist, a professional tattoo artist for Expert Village. So we are going to talk about the history of tattooing; that is a huge subject. Now, finally there has been a number of books that were written which are fairly scholarly books. I guess the most scholarly book of the earlier part of the twentieth century was written by two formal naval military people from New England called, "Art, Sex and Symbol" and this book was up to now the most scholarly study on tattooing. Although there was still a lot of nineteenth century sort of chauvinism and racism represented in the text. There really is very, very little evidence of where tattooing comes from. There are a lot of speculation. Anthropologist and archaeologist has speculated that tattooing has been around since the dawn of man. There were lots of evidences that tools and possible tools were found in the earliest places of man in LaScall in Portugal. The first places where they found cave paintings, they also found clusters of bird bones and sharpen stones and balls of pigment which could be argued, were used for body decoration or cosmetic purposes, but also could be argued that they were using them for tattoos. So some of the proof of early tattooing comes from archaeologist digs that dig back to the early part of the nineteenth century that were mummies on earth in the precess of Hawthorn Tomb in Egypt which predict Christianity by about four thousand years. And these women who were buried along with the precess in her tomb, had concentric lines and abstract designs tattooed on their lower abdomens. The mummies were preserved well enough so that the tattoos could still be designable. "