Five thousand years
The dated points: bodies with marks on them, bans with statutes behind them, revivals with a year.
The episodes
A ban, an expedition, a photograph, a revival — dated, and with the paper that did it where there is one.
{'name': 'Before writing', 'th': 'ก่อนประวัติศาสตร์'}
{'name': 'The colonial record', 'th': 'ยุคอาณานิคม'}
How the word got in
English had no single word for the practice until Cook's crew brought one back from Polynesia.
Exhibited
Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domainFor two and a half centuries, the main way a European saw a tattooed body was on a stage, with an entrance fee.
The leg-tattoo zone
เขตลายขา
One custom, four peoples, and a boundary that runs through the middle of modern Thailand rather than along its edge.
Japan outlaws it
Japan banned tattooing while presenting itself to the world, and foreigners immediately travelled there to be tattooed.
The painted ones
Spain called the Visayans *Pintados*, the painted ones, described their tattoos in detail, and converted them out of the practice within two…
The Tohunga Suppression Act
A New Zealand statute aimed at Māori specialists, which caught tā moko along with everything else a tohunga did.
{'name': 'The twentieth century', 'th': 'ศตวรรษที่ 20'}
The Chin ban
Burma's socialist government banned Chin facial tattooing in the 1960s; missionaries had been discouraging it for decades already.
{'name': 'Now', 'th': 'ปัจจุบัน'}
Where the marks go
Each tradition here records which zones of the body it marks. Counted together, the zones sort into two kinds.
The tattoo is clothing
Sources in Burmese, Northern Thai, Spanish and Samoan — and a Cordilleran rule recorded in English — reach for the same comparison: the tattoo is not…
Who gets written about
Every tradition on this site that has a Wikipedia article, ranked by how many languages wrote one.
Stopped, and started again
Several traditions here stopped and came back. Where both ends are datable, this site subtracts them and prints the gap.
What the word means first
The word each tradition uses for the tattoo, and what it meant before it meant that.