About tattoos

Humans have marked their bodies with tattoos for thousands of years. These permanent designs — sometimes plain, sometimes elaborate, always personal — have served as amulets, status symbols, declarations of love, signs of religious beliefs, adornments and even forms of punishment.

The word tattoo is said to has two major derivations from the polynesian word ‘ta’ which means striking something and the tahitian word ‘tatau’ which means ‘to mark something’.

Tattooing has been a Eurasian practice at least since Neolithic times. Mummies bearing tattoos and dating from the end of the second millennium BC have been discovered at Pazyryk on the Ukok Plateau. Tattooing in Japan is thought to go back to the Paleolithic era, some ten thousand years ago. Various other cultures have had their own tattoo traditions, ranging from rubbing cuts and other wounds with ashes, to hand-pricking the skin to insert dyes.



Tattooing involves the placement of pigment into the skin's dermis, the layer of connective tissue underlying the epidermis. After initial injection, pigment is dispersed throughout a homogenized damaged layer down through the epidermis and upper dermis, in both of which the presence of foreign material activates the immune system's phagocytes to engulf the pigment particles. As healing proceeds, the damaged epidermis flakes away (eliminating surface pigment) while deeper in the skin granulation tissue forms, which is later converted to connective tissue by collagen growth. This mends the upper dermis, where pigment remains trapped within fibroblasts, ultimately concentrating in a layer just below the dermis/epidermis boundary. Its presence there is very stable, but in the long term (decades) the pigment tends to migrate deeper into the dermis, accounting for the degraded detail of old tattoos.



In few groups or religions, tattoo is an integral part of their religion and each person following the religion is required to have that tattoo mark on their body symbolizing the person authority as a group member. Even modern day gangs are seen to have a particular mark on their shoulders signifying their group name.

First Electric Tattoo Machine

The first electronic tattoo machine was invented by an American tattoo artist named Samuel O’Reilly in 1890, which gave birth to the new era of tattooing in which people started to have different kind of tattoos on various parts of their body. But tattoos were not respected in its earlier days and were considered as a kind of non sense thing suitable only for drunkards or sailors and sometimes, criminals too.



Tattoo enthusiasts may refer to tattoos as "tats," "ink," "art," or "work," and to tattooists as "artists." The latter usage is gaining greater support, with mainstream art galleries holding exhibitions of tattoo designs and photographs of tattoos. Tattoo designs that are mass-produced and sold to tattoo artists and studios and displayed in shop are known as flash.

There is no "underground" community, no dark den of drunken sailors initiating themselves into manhood via cheap, ill-conceived exercises in bodily perforation; it's just a group of people who delight in using their bodies as billboards. -Joanne McCubrey, "Walking Art: Tattoos," Mountain Democrat Weekend magazine, 9 February 1990

Beauty is skin deep. A tattoo goes all the way to the bone. -Vince Hemingson

Reason #7 For Not Getting a Tattoo: People will know you are running your own life, instead of listening to them! -Sailor Jerry Collins, tattoo artist

Sources

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2007/january/tattoo.php

http://www.tattoos-by-design.co.uk/history.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tattoo