Tattooing is an ancient practice, which goes back as far as eight thousand years.¹ The association of tattoos with a stigma in some cultures seems to have ancient roots. In ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome, tattoos were used as a punishment and marked convicts and enslaved people. The Greek word for tattoos was “stigma.”² This word likely provides an origin for the use of the word stigma as a mark of disgrace in some cultures.³

Prior to the eighteenth century, the English were familiar with tattoos through cross-cultural connections, but did not have a word for them. Instead, they used a variety of descriptive words like pouncing, pricking, pinking, rasing, cutting, and engraving.⁴ In July of 1769, the explorer Captain Cook landed on the island of Tahiti. Describing its people, he noted that men and women had markings, “Tattow, as it is called in their Language.”⁵ While European tattooing existed well before Cook’s encounter with Tahitians, as the published account of his travels spread, so did the Tahitian word “tattow” or “tattoo.”

How were tattoos made in the eighteenth century?

The process for tattooing was similar across cultures, although the materials used would depend on locally available resources. According to an early eighteenth century account by a French traveler describing tattooing among Indigenous tribes in the American Southeast, someone would “take seven or eight needles,” or sharp fish or animal bones and “dissolve cinnabar or vermilion in water, or perhaps charcoal of willow wood that has been finely ground.”⁶ Then, they would “dip each needle into either of these two colors and lightly prick the skin with them, as quickly as possible. The color enters into the holes made by the needles and incorporates itself into the flesh, marking the design. This lasts for life.”⁷ Another method was to prick the flesh first, and then, according to another French traveler, “put into the pricks red lead, crushed charcoal, or whatever other colour they wish to apply.”⁸

Tattoos in Indigenous Virginia

In Eastern Woodlands cultures, tattoos were very common and embedded in Indigenous cultural practice.⁹ The earliest archaeological evidence of Indigenous tattooing is a tattoo bundle  consisting of sharpened turkey bones from between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago found in central Tennessee.¹⁰ English explorers and colonists of the east coast in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries noted tattoos on both men and women. Thomas Hariot explored the Outer Banks in the 1580s, remarking that “The inhabitãts of all the cuntrie for the most parte haue marks rased on their backs.”¹¹ Colonists described women with tattoos on their arms, chests, thighs and hands which took the shape of flowers, fruits, animals, and “curious knots.”¹²

The role and meaning of tattoos varied across Indigenous societies and changed over time. They often related to an individual’s tribal affiliation and role in society. They could also mark military achievements, have a religious or medicinal purpose, or simply be adornment.¹³

Tattoos in Colonial Virginia

Tattooing had a long history in European culture, but tattoos did not hold the same kind of cultural significance in English society as it did in Eastern Woodlands Indigenous societies. The stigma of tattoos’ long association with Greek and Roman slaves and criminals seems to have continued, making them taboo in mainstream society. The practice of tattooing was generally associated with the lower class, including sailors.¹⁴ But between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, tattoos also became common among religious pilgrims, who would receive them during their travels to Jerusalem as marks of their religious commitment, and as a type of souvenir.¹⁵

Records of tattoos in colonial Virginia are scarce and mostly appear in runaway advertisements in the Virginia Gazette for white apprentices and indentured and convict servants. Is this because tattoos were more common among that group, or because runaway advertisements were one of the few places where people’s physical characteristics were described in detail? References to tattoos were typically described as “mark’d with Gunpowder” and the marks included names and initials, dates, and religious iconography such as crosses or “the Figure of our Saviour.”¹⁶ Almost all references to tattoos were men, but one woman, a Welsh convict servant named Winnifred Thomas had a tattoo of her initials and a year on her wrist.¹⁷

Body modification was common in African cultures, and included body scarification and tattooing.¹⁸ Runaway advertisements for enslaved people described the individual in detail in order to enable their capture. But among  Africans and their descendants enslaved in colonial Virginia, evidence for tattoos is scarce. Some advertisements describe a “country mark.” While this could have described tattoos, some descriptions specifically describe a “country mark” as body scarification. For example, enslaver Benjamin Scott advertised in the Virginia Gazette for the return of a recently transported “young Eboe” man who had “a Parcel of small Scars on his Forehead, which is suppos’d to be his Country Mark.”¹⁹

Converging Cultures

When European explorers encountered Indigenous people’s tattoos, they interpreted them through their own worldview. To the British, tattoos signified Indigenous people’s barbarism, while also providing a visual sign of their identity and status.²⁰ Europeans believed that they could “civilize” Indigenous people, and tattoos played a part in this mindset. British people were descended from the ancient Picts, who had a vibrant tattoo culture. In British popular memory, the Picts were conquered and then civilized by the Romans. In that process, the practice of tattooing left the mainstream. Europeans compared Indigenous people with these ancient Picts, taking hope from Pict history that they would be able to conquer and civilize Indigenous people.²¹

By the late eighteenth century, tattooing had become a hybrid cultural practice. Indigenous people adopted European tools in their tattooing, including needles and gunpowder.²² At the same time, some Europeans received tattoos. French traveler Jean Bernard Bossu wrote in the mid-eighteenth century that the “Arkansas have just adopted me. A deer was tattooed on my thigh as a sign that I have been made a warrior and a chief.“²³ Some Europeans seemed to worry that getting tattooed implied descent into being uncivilized. One father wrote to his son warning him not to engage in this practice, telling him, “Don’t lose yourself in libertinage… Be careful not to be silly enough to get pricked, I forbid you to do so.”²⁴

By the late eighteenth century, the practice of tattooing was waning among Indigenous tribes of the Eastern Woodlands, perhaps as a result of the extreme shifts that happened in Indigenous societies as a result of colonization.²⁵ Today, tattooing is one of the cultural elements, including language and dance, that Indigenous communities are revitalizing as they reclaim elements of their traditional culture.

Sources

1. Aaron Deter-Wolf, and Carol Dias-Granados, eds., Drawing with Great Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America (University of Texas Press, 2013), xi-xii.
2. C.P. Jones, "Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity," The Journal of Roman Studies, 77 (1987), 142, 150.
3. Ibid., 150.
4. Mairin Odle, Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 19.
5. James Cook, Captain Cook’s Journal During his First Voyage Round the World Made in M.M. Bark. “Endeavour,” 1768-71, ed. W.J.L. Wharton (Elliot Stock, 1893), link.
6. The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715-1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic, trans. and ed. Gordon M. Sayre and ed. Carla Zecher (Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2012), 348; Odle, Under the Skin, 57; “John Long’s Journal, 1768-1782” in Early Western Travels,” 1748-1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904), 2: 85, link.
7. The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715-1747, 348.
8. Joseph-Francois Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, ed. and trans. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore (The Champlain Society, 1977), 2: 33-35.
9. Aaron Deter-Wolf, Tanya M. Peres, Steven Karacic, “Ancient Native American bone tattooing tools and pigments: Evidence from central Tennessee,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 37 (2021), 7.
10. Deter-Wolf, et. al., “Ancient Native American bone tattooing tools and pigments,” 1.
11. Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003), 66 link.
12. George Percy, Observations Gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern Colonie in Virginia by the English 1606 in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed. Narratives of Early Virginia. (Barnes & Noble, 1946), link; William Strachey, The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia (The Hakluyt Society, 1819), link.
13. Odle, Under the Skin, 18; Lars Krutak, “Tattoos, Totem Marks, and War Clubs: Projecting Power through Visual Symbolism in Northern Woodlands Culture” in Deter-Wolf and Dias-Granados, eds., Drawing with Great Needles, 97.
14. Ira Dye, “The Tattoos of Early American Seafarers, 1796-1818,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133, no. 4 (December 1989), 522.
15. Juliet Fleming, “The Renaissance Tattoo,” in Jane Caplan, Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (Princeton University Press, 2000), 79.
16. Virginia Gazette (Parks), June 9, 1738, link, Virginia Gazette (Parks), November 9, 1739, link.
17. Virginia Gazette (Parks), August 5, 1737, link.
18. Marcos André Torres de Souza and Camilla Agostini, “Body Marks, Pots, and Pipes: Some Correlations between African Scarifications and Pottery Decoration in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Historical Archaeology 46, no. 3 (2012), 105.
19. Virginia Gazette (Hunter), January 30, 1752, link.
20. Odle, Under the Skin, 40.
21. Ibid., 26.
22. Ibid., 57.
23. Jean-Bernard Bossu’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1751-1762. Trans. and ed. Seymour Feiler (University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 66. This translation from the original French uses the modern term ”tattoo.”
24. Quoted in Odle, Under the Skin, 58.
25. William Bartram, “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians,” in Thomas P. Slaughter, ed. Travels and Other Writings (Library of America, 1996), 533-4, link. Tattoo scholar Lars Krutak argues that ”the most symbolic and complex forms of tattooing probably died out even earlier.” Lars Krutak, Tattoo Traditions of Native North America: Ancient and Contemporary Expressions of Identity (LM Publishers, 2014), 197.