The History of Tattoos goes back many thousands of years and is a very intriguing story. And, there are as many reasons why people get tattooed as there are people who have them.
There are many reasons why people choose to ink their bodies. Some people do it for personal or relationship reasons, and others do it as an artistic way of self expression. Some people get tattoos just to be cool and others get tattoos to commemorate people, places, and events that they want to remember forever.
Tattoos are permanent unless steps are gone through to have them removed. This is something that many usually people fail to really take into consideration until quite a while after they've gotten their tattoo.


It has been done in cultures all around the world and by many different people for many different reasons. They have been used for various reasons in various cultures, from ancient Borneo to Japan to Greece. They mean different things in different cultures although the methods of application were much different back then than they are today.

In different parts of Asia, tattoos were used for a lot of things as well. Girls were marked when they were of age to be taken and married with a man.
In addition, they were used to signify rankings in life. Those who were slaves were marked differently than those who were in the military or vice versa.
Different Asian countries had different traditions, but most all of them had permanent body markings; although it may have been only a small percentage of that culture.

The ability to tattoo shows some promising things about different cultures. Those who were able to master such a painstaking process in the early beginnings of tattooing, have indeed become the precursors of today's tattoo artists. These ancient Asian peoples were part of the original tattoo history as is evidenced by how far back their art can be traced.



  (The Last Kalinga tattooist Whang Od stenciling a new tattoo designs on Elaine Tima with her Kisi in a dark back room at the Batok Festival. Elaine’s father Rufino is a noted Kalinga anthropologist)
High up in the terraced rice fields of the Philippine Cordillera mountains, traditional tattooing (batek, Kalinga) among the former headhunters of northwestern Luzon is nearly extinct. Today, you can only see traces of the indelible art in its entire splendor among the Kalinga and maybe one or two other groups living in the area. But back in 1900, just before American authorities outlawed headhunting, tattoo was to be seen everywhere, especially among the Bontoc Igorot, Kalinga, and Ifugao peoples.



Asia is an extremely complex mosaic of intertwined cultures - some going back into the mists of time. If we look close enough, we do find that these ancient cultures have left their mark in subtle ways on existing Asian populations. Rather than looking at the present day dominant population groups, relic populations may show us a much clearer picture of Asia's past.

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