It’s 2025 and at this point it’s fair to say that if you don’t have a tattoo yourself, you probably know plenty of people who do have at least one piece of body art.

In our modern times, body art, along with piercings, have become a popular way to express yourself in the most permanent way: on your skin.

But while around one third of Americans have a tattoo nowadays, with ink becoming increasingly popular as time goes on, this wasn’t always the case, with increasingly beautiful and diverse body art helping the practise to shake its once negative and subversive connotations.

However, those connotations weren’t always widespread – and with the history of tattoos stretching back to the Neolithic Period – so it’s safe to say that body art, though its long history, has gone through periods of fashion and flux, with the current popularity of tattoos just one of the boom periods for the artform.

So it’s not usually a surprise when ancient peoples are found to have had tattoos – after all, the oldest known tattoo dates back to between 3370 and 3100 BCE.

But the recent examination of an ancient South American mummy has shaken the archaeology world recently, for a fascinating reason.

Her tattoos, which mark her arm and her face, are very much unlike previously discovered tattoos of the time, suggesting that the tattooing methods and designs of her region and time period are a previously undiscovered part of human history.

The mummy, who is located at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin, Italy, was recovered from the Andes, with the textiles she was buried in revealing that she died between 1215 and 1382 CE.

And as a recent paper published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage reveals, the tattoos that she bore are very different to anything researchers have seen before.

The tattoos in question – three lines on her right cheek and an ‘s’ shape on her right wrist – are unique in what we know of the region, both in terms of their design and location, as the authors explain in their paper:

“In general, skin marks on the face are rare among the groups of the ancient Andean region and even rarer on the cheeks. As far as cultural classification on the basis of skin markings is concerned, the findings from the Turin mummy are unique.”

But what’s more is that as well as expanding our knowledge of the types of tattoos common in the region at the time, the discovery has also broadened historians’ understanding of the pigments used by ancient Andean artists to tattoo.

That’s because the tattoo ink was found to be of very different composition to the usual charcoal-based pigments. In fact, the Andean woman’s tattoos were inked with magnetite and pyroxenes, minerals found in rocks (the latter derived from volcanic rocks), changing the landscape on ancient tattoos, as the researchers continue:

“As far as the Authors know, the use of a black pigment made from magnetite for tattooing has not yet been reported on South American mummies; the identification of pyroxenes as tattoo pigment is even less common.”

What’s clear to see here is that, despite what your grandmother might say, your new tattoo slots you nicely into over five thousand years of human history.

If you found that story interesting, learn more about why people often wake up around 3 AM and keep doing it for life.