Oetzi, the glacier mummy from northern Italy: Oetzi lived about 3400 years BC, and he had 15 groups of tattoos on his body, two of them can be seen near his right ankle.

Tattooed Scythian Mummy

The tattooed British King
George V (1910 - 1936)

The tattooed king Frederik 9th of Denmark (11 March 1899 – 14 January 1972). In 1966 king Frederik 9th declared a law prohibiting tattooing of face, neck, hands and feet

The oldest Tattoo Shop in Germany in Hamburg with the famous tattoo artists Herbert Hoffmann, Albert Cornelissen and Karlmann Richter (from left).

Where the first men tattooed each other is not known. Tattooed mumies have been found in Southamerica, Asia, the Mittle East but also in Europa. Tattooing has been a practice since Neolithic times. The Iceman "Özi" already was tattood and he lived about 3300 years BC.

In some societies tatoos were also linked to a particular group. Known is this especially form Japan. But in Europe too: Germanic, Celtic and other central and northern European tribes were often heavily tattooed and Julius Caesar described these tattoos in his books of the Gallic Wars.

It was Captain Cook and his sailors who brought back the art of tattoo from their trips to Australia and the Polynesian Island. In the united Kingdom it became fashonable for the upper class to have tattoos, including Kings like George V (1910 -1936), the first British King from the House of Windsor. It was also Cook who used the name Tattoo for this permanent body paintigs. They heard it in Polynesia.

Was it because the sailors broght these tattoos back from their trip arround the world that to be tattood became more a habit of the simple people? Typically the oldest Tattoo Shop in Germany is in the harbor-town Hamburg. Since some years things have changed again: It became fashonable for the rich and the beautifull to have tattoos. And today a lot of young people go to a tattoo shop.