Tattooing , as an experience, has its roots in times so distant that it is difficult to even imagine. Some of the oldest tattoos were found on the bodies of mummies, whose age is estimated at thousands of years!

It is difficult to say exactly where and when the art of tattooing originated, but in the form we are used to, tattoos came to us from the islands of New Zealand, Polynesia, and Indonesia. They spread around the world on the bodies of sailors, and now you can easily find a tattoo parlor almost anywhere on Earth, where you will be introduced to this ancient art.

In different peoples, tattoos were endowed with a wide variety of magical properties: children were protected from parental anger, adults were protected in battle and hunting, old people were protected from illness. However, the magic of tattoos was used not only by "savages". In the 18th and 19th centuries, British sailors depicted huge crucifixes on their backs in the hope that this would protect them from corporal punishment, which was widely practiced in the English fleet.

Among the Arabs, a tattoo with quotes from the Koran was considered the most reliable protective talisman. In all the examples given, the tattoo , one way or another, increased the social status of its owner. Although sometimes a tattoo served as a punishment for its bearer.

In Japan in the 15th and 16th centuries as a punishment for the first crime, robbers were given a horizontal line across the forehead, for the second - an arc-shaped one, and for the third - another one. As a result, a tattoo consisting of the INU hieroglyph - "dog" was obtained.

In ancient China, one of the Five Classic Commandments was also a tattoo on the face. Slaves and prisoners of war were also marked, making it difficult for them to escape and facilitating their identification. Both the Greeks and the Romans used tattoos for similar purposes, and the Spanish conquistadors continued this practice in Mexico and Nicaragua. Already in our century, during the First World War, deserters were marked with a tattoo and "D" in Britain, numbers were punched out for victims of concentration camps in Germany, and what to hide, in the Soviet Union, in regime camps, the same thing was practiced...

As sad as it is, the fact remains that civilization has reduced ancient art to the level of cheap consumer goods. The lack of demand for decent products discouraged tattooists , leaving an incentive for creativity and new stylistic developments.

And only thanks to the powerful surge of youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of tattoo artists appeared, whose creative ambitions and daring experiments once again raised the tattoo to the rank of art. They widely borrowed traditional images of other cultures — the Far East, Polynesia, American Indians — creating exciting hybrids, new tattoo styles , schools and directions. Thus began a new, modern stage of thousand-year-old tattoo history, which undoubtedly deserves a separate detailed story.