Pazyryk Horse Tattoos

A tribe that inhabited the Altai Mountains of Siberia, the Pazyryks maintained a lifelong bond to horses that was crucial to their nomadic lifestyle and trading — so much that horses are found on tattooed mummies dated to the Iron Age (6th to 3rd centuries BC). This may be surprising considering that they almost never revealed skin in public. As something literally carved into the skin, these elaborate designs suggest the relationships that can be created through embodied attention even when they are not intended to be appreciated in public: the vulnerable ritual of receiving the tattoo, new attitudes and beliefs that it imbues on the individual, and its intentional preservation long after other body parts have disintegrated.  

In “Inked: Human-Horse Apprenticeship, Tattoos, and Time in the Pazyryk World,” Gala Argent emphasizes that horse riding was seen as an apprenticeship in learning the language of horses, and experienced horses continue to be seen in Eurasian equestrianism as “schoolmasters” that bring their individualized techniques to train riders. As horses and humans grow together, horses also become a measure of time and mark the milestone events of a person’s life. While the mutual human-horse bond was shared by the community overall, tattoos mark skin, or the very “interface” between individual bodies and the world, drawing attention to the connection between personal interspecies bonds and larger symbolic, cosmological systems.

Read more about them here.