Tattooing has been practiced worldwide. The Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, wore facial tattoos. Tattooing was widespread among Polynesian peoples, and among certain tribal groups in the Philippines, Borneo, Africa, North America, South America, Mesoamerica, Europe, Japan, Cambodia and China. Despite some taboos surrounding tattooing, the art continues to be popular all over the world.
It has been around for thousands of years and has a direct link to culture and symbolism of each culture. Tattooing has been a Eurasian practice at least since Neolithic times. Even mummies also bearing tattoos and dating from the end of the second millennium BC have been discovered at Pazyryk on the Ukok Plateau. In Japan it 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.
In the past tattoo served as rites of passage, marks of status and rank, symbols of religious and spiritual devotion, decorations for bravery, sexual lures and marks of fertility, pledges of love, punishment, amulets and talismans, protection, and as the marks of outcasts, slaves and convicts. The symbolism and impact of tattoos varies in different places and cultures, sometimes with unintended consequences. For example shamrock tattoos are believed to belong exclusively to the Aryan Brotherhood (within their range of the US prison system), but on the streets of America a shamrock tattoo can stand for whatever the wearer wants it to.
Today, people choose to be tattooed for cosmetic, sentimental/memorial, religious, and magical reasons, and to symbolize their belonging to or identification with particular groups (see Criminal tattoos). Tattoos of favorite bands and football teams' logos are fairly common in the west.[citation needed] Some Māori still choose to wear intricate moko on their faces. In Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, the yantra tattoo is used for protection.
Now tattoos are used more as expressions of character. People find that being able to put what they find important in their lives on themselves for others to see is part of their freedom of speech. There are many various type of tattoo design. People see tattoos as an art and design.
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