A Basic History of Tattoo Designs
A Basic History of Tattoo Designs
There are many different streams of history with respect to the designs of tattoos. In fact, even though some of these events happened before other ones, it can be difficult to draw a chain of causation because of how independent the events actually were.
A good example here can be found several thousand years before the Common Era when tattoo designs were being actively used both in the Oriental east and in the African sub-continent. In the case of the former, it was an imperial structure while in the case of the latter, it was tribal in nature. Now, most historians would probably agree that the first tattoo use in China preceded the first tattoo use in Africa by a count of multiple hundreds of years. However, it is not fair to say that Chinese tattoo art paved the way for African art simply because the two geographical areas at that time were separate from each other almost absolutely.
Tattoo designs have cropped up around the world in many places independently of each other, but there have also been some serious points of mixing in the creation of the modern tattoo. European sailors that traveled around the world noticed tribes and other empires using tattoo art and decided that importation was definitely a good idea. The colonies in the New World and even places in Old World Europe began to use similar designs.
When North America started evolving down a path different from Europe, tattoo designs changed as well. However, the modern tattoos of rebellion and artistic expression really didn’t become popularized until the decade of civil unrest known as the 1960s. Ever since that time however, each passing year has seen tattoo designs slowly but surely integrated bit by bit into the generally accepted pop culture at large.
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