Iron age tattoo dye?
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The earliest I know of is soot from burnt animal fat. The Inuit dragged a thread through it and 'sewed' it under the skin. The European mummies that are tattoo'd, and that includes Oetzi, and he's Bronze Age, seem to be done with soot too.
Why ?
By the bye, Stuart did a cracking report on his tattoo.........nine hours in a long house lying under a net of human skulls
cheers,
Toddy
Why ?
By the bye, Stuart did a cracking report on his tattoo.........nine hours in a long house lying under a net of human skulls
cheers,
Toddy
Can I ask why you're asking this? I'm a part time tattooist and have seen some horrendous things by people trying homemade tattoos. If you want a tattoo please don't do it on the cheap, it really is not worth it. If it's traditional tattooing you're info have a look here...
http://www.tao-of-tattoos.com/tebori.html
http://www.freetattoodesigns.org/polynesian-tattoos.html
Great forums here...
http://forum.ink-trails.com/forums.html
Hope this helps mate.
http://www.tao-of-tattoos.com/tebori.html
http://www.freetattoodesigns.org/polynesian-tattoos.html
Great forums here...
http://forum.ink-trails.com/forums.html
Hope this helps mate.
I've seen some horrendous things by people trying "professional" tattooists...any Tom, dick or Harry can start up as one in their local indoor market... I go down to my local one to look at pictures of "their own work" to see how bad it gets, it's not pleasant! (But highly amusing in a sick kinda way)
Thanks for the replies.
No it's not for me someone I know wants to know. Not sure if he wants to experiment with it. We are both intrested in the iron age so you never know!
No it's not for me someone I know wants to know. Not sure if he wants to experiment with it. We are both intrested in the iron age so you never know!
To obtain the blue dye the woad has to degrade, to rett, and then it has to be presented in anaerobic conditions so that it oxidises on the dye medium, whether that be fabric or skin.
I've got masses of it growing just now, I'm going to have a play.
I know that I did dye my skin quite deeply when I used it when I had been using masses of handcream to cure a hack. I wonder if the fat would provide a suitable base? I do remember being told that sour butter was used with it to draw designs for ritual use.
cheers,
Toddy
I've got masses of it growing just now, I'm going to have a play.
I know that I did dye my skin quite deeply when I used it when I had been using masses of handcream to cure a hack. I wonder if the fat would provide a suitable base? I do remember being told that sour butter was used with it to draw designs for ritual use.
cheers,
Toddy
Is there actually any reliable source for the use of woad? As far as I know, it all hangs on a rather dubious translation of one line in Julius Caesar's Commentarii de bello Gallico... According to the link I provided above:
No physical evidence that I know of 
Somewhere though someone quoted a Greek translation and it was definitely blue that was mentioned, not just designs.
I'm sorry, head gone to mush this afternoon, and I don't recall the source at all.
Our fair skins are inclined to make things under it look blue though........the old men from the first world war with shrapnel bits in their faces and hands and arms looked like blue bits underneath; some of the old miners who'd gotten coal under the skin too, looked blueish over the tiny fragments. My Uncle is nearly 90 and his shrapnel from WW2 looks blue/grey under the skin. There's no real 'bits', just scar sort of.
What about the coloidal silver too ? could that be used ? The ladies I mentioned in another thread who had overdosed on it have been silver grey almost forever it seems.
cheers,
Toddy
Somewhere though someone quoted a Greek translation and it was definitely blue that was mentioned, not just designs.
I'm sorry, head gone to mush this afternoon, and I don't recall the source at all.
Our fair skins are inclined to make things under it look blue though........the old men from the first world war with shrapnel bits in their faces and hands and arms looked like blue bits underneath; some of the old miners who'd gotten coal under the skin too, looked blueish over the tiny fragments. My Uncle is nearly 90 and his shrapnel from WW2 looks blue/grey under the skin. There's no real 'bits', just scar sort of.
What about the coloidal silver too ? could that be used ? The ladies I mentioned in another thread who had overdosed on it have been silver grey almost forever it seems.
cheers,
Toddy
Well, the other possible translations I've seen propose that Ceasar said something like "All the British colour themselves with glass, which produces a blue colour" (from the same link again) - and I know there's archaeological evidence for blue glass ornamentation, although it's not clear that that's what he meant. (How's your Latin? The original is "Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem." I haven't a clue.)
The "Picts", on the other hand, are described by Claudius Claudianus as marking their faces with iron - although whether this refers to scarification with iron implements or tattooing with iron-based pigments is unclear.
There is also a claim that Pliny the Elder referred to the use of woad in women's funerary rites, but he uses the word "glastum" and describes it as "plantain-like", whereas in another book he refers explicitly to woad as "isatis".
As for the Greeks... Don't you run into the the whole "who were the keltoi" problem? I don't think you can argue that the practices of the people the Greeks called keltoi necessarily applied to the Britons. (Although I'm not sure if we're talking about the Britons specifically here - I think I am, but I can't speak for anybody else.)
All this debate over the translations of classical languages is beyond me, I'm just repeating stuff I've read elsewhere... What we really need are more bog-bodies.
The "Picts", on the other hand, are described by Claudius Claudianus as marking their faces with iron - although whether this refers to scarification with iron implements or tattooing with iron-based pigments is unclear.
There is also a claim that Pliny the Elder referred to the use of woad in women's funerary rites, but he uses the word "glastum" and describes it as "plantain-like", whereas in another book he refers explicitly to woad as "isatis".
As for the Greeks... Don't you run into the the whole "who were the keltoi" problem? I don't think you can argue that the practices of the people the Greeks called keltoi necessarily applied to the Britons. (Although I'm not sure if we're talking about the Britons specifically here - I think I am, but I can't speak for anybody else.)
All this debate over the translations of classical languages is beyond me, I'm just repeating stuff I've read elsewhere... What we really need are more bog-bodies.
Hmmm, well caeruleum is jacob's ladder, not woad. Woad does have leaves kind of like plantain.......think longer versions of basil and not so fragile and it'd be closer. I need to check the grammar; is it sky ?
I don't think it could be taken to mean scarification; we scar white and fine, not raised kelloid ones, as a general rule.
Iron, going by the marks I mentioned on the old men with shrapnel, does leave blue/ dark grey scars. maybe ??
Keltoi.......oh heavens, that's another can of worms, isn't it ? Those SIberian mummies though......they had tattoos, from soot. Administered by pricking with an iron needle maybe ?
I only did Greek at school for six months, I found cyrillic a nightmare to add into the mix.
The Irish called the Picts, Cruithne; the people of the designs. No idea if it meant their decoration of stones and houses, clothing or themselves.
You're right, we need more bog bodies.
atb,
M
I don't think it could be taken to mean scarification; we scar white and fine, not raised kelloid ones, as a general rule.
Iron, going by the marks I mentioned on the old men with shrapnel, does leave blue/ dark grey scars.
maybe ??Keltoi.......oh heavens, that's another can of worms, isn't it ? Those SIberian mummies though......they had tattoos, from soot. Administered by pricking with an iron needle maybe ?
I only did Greek at school for six months, I found cyrillic a nightmare to add into the mix.
The Irish called the Picts, Cruithne; the people of the designs. No idea if it meant their decoration of stones and houses, clothing or themselves.
You're right, we need more bog bodies.
atb,
M
Speaking as an archaeologist who specialises in the British Iron Age - don't believe everything you read!
Caesar was writing for an audience at home in Rome and wished to make his adventures in Britain as daring as possible; after all he'd crossed Ocean and defeated a near-mythic adversary.
There is relatively little evidence for tattooing in the Iron Age, I don't think there's even much evidence from Danish bog-bodies but it's become a stereotype lodged in the public consciousness along the same lines as Braveheart and we all know that was invented by an Australian with a serious hang-up about his country's colonial past and Britain's part in it.
Caesar was writing for an audience at home in Rome and wished to make his adventures in Britain as daring as possible; after all he'd crossed Ocean and defeated a near-mythic adversary.
There is relatively little evidence for tattooing in the Iron Age, I don't think there's even much evidence from Danish bog-bodies but it's become a stereotype lodged in the public consciousness along the same lines as Braveheart and we all know that was invented by an Australian with a serious hang-up about his country's colonial past and Britain's part in it.
Vitreum is latin for glass and vitrium is latin for woad both mean blue/green because glass was a blue/green so it's easy to see the confusion.
I doubt that the iron age Brits covered themselves in glass as we didn't have it before the romans came here.
Keltoi doesn't refere to the Brits only a certain Gaulic tribe in europe. We were called the Pretanni which Briton get it's name from.
Reply to Glosfisher
Hello, come and join the club
that makes at least a dozen of us on here ........mine is fibres, clothing, and a fair bit of ethnobotany 
On the whole I agree with you, but we do have these tantalising 'glimpses' of the idea of colouring people in designs. Especially up here....and no evidences from actual bodies or from carved stones.......the Braveheart phenomenon is just sooooo bad, I'm still arguing the bit out with actors who were in that damned film who insist that their kit is correct :tapedshut 
:aargh4: but they slap that blue warpaint on everybody they work with and claim it's authentic 
cheers,
Toddy
Hello, come and join the club
that makes at least a dozen of us on here ........mine is fibres, clothing, and a fair bit of ethnobotany On the whole I agree with you, but we do have these tantalising 'glimpses' of the idea of colouring people in designs. Especially up here....and no evidences from actual bodies
or from carved stones.......the Braveheart phenomenon is just sooooo bad, I'm still arguing the bit out with actors who were in that damned film who insist that their kit is correct :tapedshut :aargh4: but they slap that blue warpaint on everybody they work with and claim it's authentic cheers,
Toddy
I thought there was evidence for traded glass beads in Britain from as early as the Bronze Age? Maybe I'm getting confused...
The "faince" beads occasionally found in Bronze Age graves were always assumed to have come from Egypt where they have something similar but mass spectrometry analysis has shown that they are simply a combination of sand and copper and may well have originated as a by-product of bronze-casting.
He's not wrong, you know. There's a bit of debate about over whether the keltoi called themselves the keltoi or whether it's a title first used by the Greeks. What's interesting is that when they arrive in italy, Roman scholars refer to them too as the keltoi but that may be as a result of reading Greek works.
It's been pretty conclusively shown there's now such thing as a "Celtic " culture and good riddance to the idea.
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