THE intricate tattoos of a 2,500-year-old Siberian “ice mummy” have finally been revealed through high-tech imaging.
The designs reveal leopards, tigers, a stag, a rooster and even some long-lost mythical creatures.
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They are so detailed that even a modern tattooist would struggle to reproduce them, according to the researchers behind the discovery.
The tattoos belong to a woman who was about 50-years-old when she died.
She is thought to have belonged to the nomadic horse-riding Pazyryk culture, which roamed the lands between China and Europe.
The scans exposed “intricate, crisp and uniform” tattooing that could not be seen with the naked eye.
Over the two millennia, the ink has become all but invisible on the body as the skin darkens with time.
“The insights really drive home to me the point of how sophisticated these people were,” lead author Dr Gino Caspari from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern, told BBC News.
Archaeologists worked with researcher Daniel Riday, a tattooist who reproduces ancient ink on his own body to understand how they were made.
Tattooing was likely widespread during prehistory, but few remains from that era are preserved well enough to investigate.
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But the so-called “ice mummies” of the Altai mountains in Siberia were often encased in ice tombs which preserved the skin.
While the tattoos were not visibly on the skin, they were brought back to life using near-infrared digital photography in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia.
The high-resolution scans were able to reveal the decorations for the first time in 2,500 years.
“This made me feel like we were much closer to seeing the people behind the art, how they worked and learned. The images came alive,” said Dr Caspari.
On her right forearm, the woman had an image of leopards and tigers around the head of two deer.
On the left arm, a mythical griffin-like creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle appears to be fighting with a stag.
“Twisted hind bodies and really intense battle scenes of wild animals are typical of the culture,” explained Dr Caspari.
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The “ice mummy” also had a rooster on her thumb, showing “an intriguing style with a certain uniqueness,” says Dr Caspari.
The design was made with uniform thickness, suggesting sophisticated methods and tools for tattooing.
Some lines were created using a multipoint tool, while others were made with a finer, single-point tool, according to the study.
The researchers could even see where the ancient tattooist stopped working and picked up again in the overlapping of some lines.
“Many cultures around the world traditionally used bundles of plant thorns and spines to tattoo,” study co-author Aaron Deter-Wolf, an archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology and ancient-tattooing expert, told Live Science in an email.
“We envision the multi-point tool as being a tightly clustered bundle of tines, probably bound together with thread or sinew.”
The tools were made of natural, biodegradable materials, meaning the researchers aren’t able to examine the implements themselves.
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