“Burmah is the land of the tattooed man.... In my visit to the great prison here, which contains more than three thousand men, I saw six thousand tattooed legs.... The origin of the custom I have not been able to find out. It is here the Burmese sign of manhood, and there is as much ceremony about it as there is about the ear-piercing of girls which chronicles their entrance upon womanhood. There are professional tattooers, who go about with books of designs.... The people are superstitious about it; and certain kinds of tattooing are supposed to ward off disease. One kind wards off the snake-bite, and another prevents a man from drowning.”—(Frank G. Carpenter, in the “Bee,” Omaha, Nebraska, May 19, 1889.)
Surgeon Corbusier, U. S. Army, says of the Apache-Yumas of Arizona Territory, that “the married women are distinguished by seven narrow blue lines running from the lower lip down to the chin.... Tattooing is practised by the women, rarely by the men.... A young woman, when anxious to become a mother, tattooes the figure of a child on her forehead.”—(In the “American Antiquarian,” November, 1886.)
The “sectarial marks” of the Hindus are possibly vestiges of a former practice of tattooing. Coleman (“Mythology of the Hindus,” London, 1832, p. 165) has a reference to them.
Squier, in his monograph upon “Manobosho,” in “American Historical Review,” 1848, says that the Mandans have a myth in which occurs the name of a god, “Tattooed Face.”
Alice Oatman stated distinctly that “she was tattooed by two of their (Mojaves) physicians,” and “marked, not as they marked their women, but as they marked their captives.” Be that as it may, the four lines on her chin, as well as can be discerned from the indifferent woodcut, are the same as can be seen upon the chins of Mojave women to-day.—(See Stratton’s “Captivity of the Oatman Girls,” San Francisco, 1857, pp. 151, 152.)
Maltebrun says of the inhabitants of the Island of Formosa: “Their skin is covered with indelible marks, representing trees, animals, and flowers of grotesque forms.”—(“Universal Geography,” American edition, Philadelphia, 1832, vol. ii. lib. 43, p. 79, article “China.”)
“The practice of marking the skin with the figures of animals, flowers, or stars, which was in existence before the time of Mahomet, has still left traces among the Bedouin women.”—(Idem, vol. i. lib. 30, p. 395.)
Speaking of the Persian ladies, the same authority says: “They stain their bodies with the figures of trees, birds, and beasts, sun, moon, and stars.”—(Idem, vol. i. lib. 33, p. 428, article “Persia.”)
In the “Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London,” vol. vi., it is stated that the “Oraon boys (India) are marked when children on the arms by a rather severe process of puncturation, which they consider it manly to endure.”
“Mojave girls, after they marry, tattoo the chin with vertical blue lines.”—(Palmer, quoted by H. H. Bancroft in “Native Races,” vol. i. p. 480.)