Tribal Tattoos

Tribal tattoos means a lot more today than it did fifteen or twenty years ago. The definition hasn’t expanded any, but people are trying to throw more design and black work tattoos into the category of tribal tattooing, unsuccessfully. A solid black tattoo isn’t necessarily tribal, in fact,  a tribal tattoo doesn’t have to be black at all. And any design isn’t in fact tribal. Any lacework design that is tattooed in black isn’t a tribal tattoos.

Tribal tattoos was a tattoo that actually designated what tribe you were in or from, or your status in that tribe. . Sometimes the tattoo design was different for men and women, sometimes only the men got it at all. It could be different if you were married rather than single. The thing is, it meant something that you understood if you were apart of a tribes, of that culture. What we think of as tribal probably comes from a poorly imitated Maori or other tribal community’s symbolic social structure. We take designs from African tribes, Pacific Islander tribes, Hawaiian,  etc., and we try to duplicate them on ourselves without any understanding of what it means, or the significance behind it. It would be similar to the Asian countries putting random letters of our Alphabet on their body just because it looked good to them.