Com 150 Final, Tattoos

Throughout history, there have been many forms of body modifications practiced by civilizations around the world.   Women in parts of Africa as well as in Thailand, coil heavy brass wire around their necks in the belief that in lengthening their neck, it makes them more beautiful. In other tribes in Africa, the women will cut a slit in their lower, and sometimes upper lips, then insert wooden, or clay discs into the newly prepared hole. The discs are then changed out with increasingly larger discs over the period of several months. These activities are fairly localized, mostly due to tribal customs. On occasion, people from outside those cultures do adopt some of these body modification practices. Some of the more widely used forms of body modification are scarification and tattoos, with tattoos having become an acceptable main stream type of this art form. Tattoos have been referred to as a fad by many, but they have a worldwide historical significance with deep roots in our civilization’s culture.
There is a theory that both scarification and tattoos may, in fact, have the same origin, where-by an open wound would have had ash or charcoal dust rubbed into it to help it heal and prevent an infection from forming. The result would be that the medium introduced into the wound would become a permanent part of the body. With a little forethought, our ancestors could have applied any type of design to there skin, simply by dipping a shard of bone into a paste made from the chosen medium, then poked into the skin (Syrkiewicz, 2008).
The oldest known tattoo comes from an iceman discovered near the Italian-Austrian border in 1991, his remains have been carbon dated at approximately 5,200 years old. Evidence shows that woman of Egypt were being tattooed as far back as 4,000 BC, and additional evidence that shows tattoos may have existed as long ago as 14,000 BC. Often, tattoos have been used to advertise abilities, as a way to display membership of a clan, or tribe, and...