Five Thousand Years On, Still There

The oldest tattoos we know of are five thousand years old. In 1991, a glacier on the Italian–Austrian border in the Ötztal Alps gave back a man it had kept. The man's skin carried sixty-one small lines: behind the knee, along the small of the back, at the ankle. Whether the work was aesthetic or medical is still debated; that the lines were there, still readable five thousand years on, is not.

Marking the skin existed before Ötzi too; afterward it took a different shape on every continent. Geometry on the bellies of Egyptian priestesses, lineage-bearing patterns in Polynesia, the centuries-long irezumi tradition of Japan, dek or deq on the hands of women in Anatolia. They share one thing: skin is not a temporary surface. What is written on it travels.

In 1891 in New York, Samuel O'Reilly modified Edison's electric pen and patented the first tattoo machine. Until that moment every line was drawn by hand, one at a time, with a needle at the end of a stick. With the machine came speed, with speed came color, with color came style. But the underlying work stayed the same: place the pigment in the dermis, just beneath the top layer. The skin above renews; what sits below stays.

The work done in a modern studio is not far, in technique, from the lines on Ötzi's back. The pigment still rests in the middle layer of the dermis; the skin still replaces its upper layer over a few weeks; the mark below still stays. What separates us is sterility, precision, intention. The clock has not changed: a line drawn once lasts as long as the skin lasts.

The opening of this site says "everything leaves a mark." The tattoo is not the exception to that sentence; it is its oldest example. A line drawn five thousand years ago is still there. A line drawn today works to the same word.