Matt Lodder

Well, the sort of general paleoanthropological guess is that tattooing is at least 45,000 and maybe 100,000 years old.

The oldest tattoos we have that have sort of survived to the present day in skin are about 5,500 years old.

So there's a sort of very famous specimen from the Austro-Italian Alps who's called Otzi the Iceman, discovered in the 1990s, who sort of covered in these little tally mark designs.

And there are some dry preserved mummies from Egypt from around the same period, from around three and a half thousand years before.

The birth of Christ, which, yeah, which which gives us a kind of minimum date of old age of five and a half thousand years.

But obviously, it's quite unlikely that those guys were the first people ever to stumble across the technology.

Oh, you probably get about 50 answers, right?

I mean, you know, a lot of people obviously get tattooed both in the present and in the past for affiliative reasons, you know, gang tattoos or tribal affiliation tattoos, tattoos to signal status in a particular social grouping.

I think most of the time though, especially in kind of contemporary Western culture, a lot of that is retrofitted, right?

So people just think they have to have a reason to get tattooed and they come up with it after the fact in a way.

Like the sort of famous example, if you've ever seen those Miami Ink shows or whatever, it's always like, you know, my dog died and my granddad died and my mum broke her toe.

So I want like three skulls on fire kind of thing to justify why they want to get a tattoo.

But I think...

Ultimately, certainly in the contemporary West, the vast majority of tattooing is going to be aesthetic or decorative first and meaningful after the fact.

Does it hurt?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It only hurts for a bit.

Marathon running hurts.

Lots of things people do hurt.