Tattoo History

Ainu

The Ainu (pronounced "eye-nu") 

"Ainu" means "human." The Ainu people regard things useful to them or beyond their control as "kamuy"(gods). In daily life, they prayed to and performed various ceremonies for the gods. These gods include : "nature" gods, such as of fire, water, wind and thunder ; "animal" gods, such as of bears, foxes, spotted owls and gram-puses ; "plant" gods, such as of aconite, mush-room and mugwort ; "object" gods, such as of boats and pots ; and gods which protect houses, gods of mountains and gods of lakes. The word "Ainu" refers to the opposite of these gods.

The Ainu, along with the Okinawa-based Ryukyu, are an indigenous population of Japan. Ainu lived
in Hokkaido, the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin, but now largely live in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island. As of the last census Ainu populations in Hokkaido were roughly 23,000 people.

In traditional Ainu culture when a woman begins to come of age at 12-13 she begins a heavy tattooing process of her lips, legs, hands and arms. When this process has been completed somewhere around the age of 15-16 she is considered ready for marriage. Ainu culture held tattooed women to be beautiful. As Helena Burton notes on the meanings of the tattoos:

Japanese Motifs

Cherry blossom

The image of the cherry blossom is very prevalent in classical Japanese tattooing and has a very definite symbolic meaning. In the Japanese tattoo authors Richie and Buruma write:

"The cherry blossom is famous in Japanese poetry, in prose, and in most of the graphic arts. It has become the symbol for all that is transient and evanescent in life. The blossoms appear in all of their beauty for only a day or two. Then they are scattered by the winds and rains. This loveliness lasts for but so short a time: how like life itself, where all things are ephemeral. It is said that the samurai adopted the cherry blossom as a personal insignia, indicating that they might well die in battle the next day. "The cherry blossom as a symbol thus has quasi-philosophical associations . . . of the same order as those attributed to, for example, the red rose in Western tattooing. There the message is undying love, eternal fidelity, and a degree of transcendence over mundane life. In Japan the cherry blossom implies a different kind of transcendence from that in the West. One acknowledges natural forces and quietly celebrates one's own evanescent qualities. The implications for a man wearing the intricate cherry-blossom pattern are that he is in accord with the nature of things, sad though this nature may be; that his own flesh is as fragile as the petals of the blossom."

Kaeshibari

In traditional Japanese Tebori tattooing, kaeshibari is the practice of flipping tattoo needles to use the ink on the other side.

To tattoo details, some tattooists use a separate tool consisting of only 3 needles. But the professional Japanese Tebori tattooists can tattoo whatever they want using only one set of needles for outlining. They don't have to use other tattooing tools. They can tattoo any thin or thick lines, small circles and so on. The professional tattooists tattoo the designs on the skin smoothly, from up to down, down to up, right to left, left to right. When more ink is needed after tattooing from left to right, for example, one does kaeshibari, flipping the needles. Kaeshibari is one of many professional techniques, which is flipping the other side of the needles and tattooing by using the rest of the ink on the other side.