Middle East:
In ancient Egypt, it was common for people including women to be tattooed with designs related to their faith. Due to the mummification process it has been possible to see preserved tattoos.
Razzouk Tattoo in Jerusalem is the oldest working tattoo parlour. Its founders, the Razzouk family, had brought the art form with them from Egypt for pilgrimage, and they decided to stay and tattoo the visiting pilgrims for a living. Due to attacks on Christians at the time, members of the coptic church used tattooing to mark their members with a cross to distinguish who was allowed to enter the church. Children were marked from a very young age. The parlour is currently run by Wassim Razzouk, the 27th generation of his family to practice tattooing there.
East Asia:
Tattooing was popular in Japan during the Edo period. It was known as irezumi (inserting ink), and tebori (carve by hand) was the method of hand tattooing using a bamboo or metal needle. Tattooing was initially part of the penal system – criminals would be marked with a symbol that represented their crime. Eventually, woodblock carvers who took on tattooing as a way of earning additional wages would provide tattoos that were designed to disguise the penal markings.
There was a saga published in 1827 called ‘The 108 Heroes of the Tale of Suikoden’. Due to its popularity people would request to be tattooed like the heroes in the tale, and because of this the woodblock carvers that illustrated the saga would depict the characters with more and more elaborate tattoo designs in order to increase their sales.
The West:
In the west, there is evidence of tattooing from as early as 800AD. In the middle ages, it was known as ‘pricking’.
When Japan opened its borders in the 19th century, we begin to see Asian influences in tattooing, and it was popular among the aristocracy at the time. King George V and his cousin, Tsar Nicolas II of Russia had matching dragons tattooed onto their arms during a visit to Japan in 1881.
The first tattoo parlours opened in 1870 and it is known that the Victorians widely had tattoos, however there is little evidence of them due to the photographic process they used at the time. The wet plate collodion process did not capture the blue and green colours of the tattoo ink and they would not appear in the developed photographs, so there is less evidence of tattooing between 1860 – 1920.
Sailors in the merchant navy got tattoos to commemorate the stories of their journeys. The designs had symbolic meanings, for example a swallow would symbolise five thousand nautical miles travelled. Religious iconography was also common. sailors were superstitious and keen to keep safe during their travels, so we see phrases like ‘hold fast’, or pigs and roosters tattooed to the top of feet (they were animals known for surviving shipwrecks).
In the 1950s, coal miners experienced a natural tattooing phenomena known as ‘colliers stripes’. This was where coal dust would encroach into the cuts and scrapes that colliers would obtain as a result of accidents and cave-ins and would remain in the skin once the wound healed. Since the longer a person worked in the mines, the higher the likelihood they would develop black lung and TB, and there emerged a belief that these diseases were linked to the number of colliers stripes the person had.
Information taken from tattooing talk given by Sean Prendergast, tattoo artist, writer and historian- https://darklight-digital.com/author/seanprendergast/
https://razzouktattoo.com/pages/history