The word tattoo may trace back to a bat's wing bone
Tattoo comes from the Samoan tatau, to strike, and linguists link its deeper Proto-Oceanic root to the wing bone of a flying fox used as a tattooing tool. The military tattoo, a drumbeat, has an unrelated Dutch origin. The practice itself goes back at least to Otzi, around 3330 BCE.
A tattoo is a design made by putting ink or pigment into the dermis, the skin's deeper layer, whether tapped in by hand in the traditional way or driven by a machine. Before the Polynesian word reached English in the 18th century, spelled tattow or tattaow, Westerners described the practice as painting, staining or scarring. Japanese has its own vocabulary: irezumi, insertion of ink, covers any method including the hand technique tebori, horimono names traditional designs, and the borrowed English word tattoo refers to foreign styles.
Their purposes span the whole of human life. Tattoos have marked rites of passage, rank, religious devotion, bravery, fertility and love; served as amulets; and been forced on outcasts, slaves and convicts as punishment. In the 20th century much of the world associated them with sailors and prisoners. Today people choose them for art, memory, faith, or to signal membership of a group, from ethnic communities and law-abiding subcultures to criminal gangs. Functional uses include identification, cosmetic permanent makeup and medical marking.
In 1900 the British anthropologist Ling Roth sorted skin marking into four kinds. Tatu, pricking that leaves smooth skin, was common in the Pacific Islands; moko, combined with chiselling that leaves grooves, belonged to New Zealand; cicatrix meant knife or chisel scarring, as in West Africa; and keloid meant raised scars made by reopening wounds, found in Tasmania, Melanesia and Central Africa.
Not all tattoos are chosen. Dermatologists recognise traumatic tattoos, where asphalt, gunpowder or pencil graphite is driven into a wound. Coal miners developed blue lines called collier's stripes as dust entered small cuts, and dental work can leave amalgam particles lodged in the gums. Parlours, meanwhile, display flash: sheets of ready-drawn designs customers can pick from or adapt.
Source: Tattoo
