The woman had been dead for more than two millennia when scientists found her buried deep in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Her skin had darkened and dried, preserved by the permafrost. To the naked eye, there was no sign of anything special on her skin.
But when researchers peered at her through the lens of high-resolution near-infrared photography, the images emerged: tigers and leopards circling stags, a rooster perched on her thumb, and a mythical griffin lunging at its prey.
“This made me feel like we were much closer to seeing the people behind the art,” said Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and lead author of the study published in Antiquity, as per BBC. “The images came alive.”
Reading The Skin Of The Ancients
The woman, about 50 years old when she died, was part of the Pazyryk culture. They were nomadic horse-riding pastoralists whose territory stretched across the Eurasian steppe in the early Iron Age. Their frozen tombs, first unearthed in the 19th century, have yielded some of archaeology’s most remarkable finds, including exquisitely preserved fabrics, wooden carvings, and mummified human remains.
Now, they’ve showed us some wicked tattoos.
Tattoos are rare in the archaeological record, because skin rarely survives the centuries. But in the permafrost of the Altai, some mummies still carry well-preserved tattoos, giving rare evidence of ancient body art.
The new scans reveal not only the designs themselves but the artistry and labor that went into them. On her right forearm, leopards, tigers, and a stag are arranged with a sophistication that modern tattooists admire. The placement of the animals flows along the arm, using its curves to enhance the design. Details like the antlers, paws, and stripes were rendered with precision—likely requiring ultiple sessions and multiple tools.
The left forearm, by contrast, is less refined. Perspective is inconsistent, and anatomical details are simplified. The difference, researchers believe, points to two different tattooists—one highly skilled, the other less experienced—or to work done at different times in the woman’s life.
How to make an ancient tattoo
By comparing the scans with experimental tattooing done using ancient methods, the team concluded that the designs were created using “hand-poking”—a needle dipped in pigment and pushed into the skin dot by dot. Multi-point tools, probably made from bone or horn, created the bold outlines, while single-point needles added fine details.
The pigment came from carbon materials like charcoal or soot, a method seen in many tattooing traditions worldwide. The work was likely stenciled before being inked, and each session may have taken hours, performed in the open steppe.
Daniel Riday, a researcher and professional tattooist who collaborated on the study, estimated that the right forearm alone would have taken at least nine hours of continuous work. “That’s a solid commitment from the person,” he told BBC. “Imagine sitting on the ground in the wind all that time.”
Imagine all that being poked continuously, bleeding before antibiotics and anti-inflammatories were a thing.
Tattoos Meant For The Living
The scans also showed something unexpected: in preparing the body for burial, Pazyryk mourners cut directly through some of the tattoos. This suggests that the designs carried meaning in life but not in death. “The apparent disregard for preserving tattoo designs during Pazyryk burial preparation suggests that the social or spiritual function of the marks ended with the death of the individual,” the authors explained.
It’s unclear exactly what the significance of the tattoos are, however; or even if they have a particular significance at all.
For archaeologists, this find is a rare chance to study an ancient art form in exquisite detail—and to see, perhaps for the first time in 2,000 years, the hands of the artists themselves.
