How They Use Tattoos To Tell Stories

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Fatiha Fatene
Professor Cary
ENG 111-04
17 July 2014
The Art and Stories of North African Tattoo Culture
Humans have marked their bodies with tattoos for thousands of years. North African
tattoos have different forms of cultural and behavioral expression. They have served as status
symbols, signs of religious beliefs, symbols of beauty, amulets, and even forms of
punishment. Each symbol has a meaning, and each woman who has tattoos tells her story with
them. Whether on the face or body, traditional tattoos remained an integral way to pass down
stories and beliefs, preserve traditional rituals, and show the significance of the tattoos and the
role they played in the lives of tattooed women. The fascination and desire to penetrate and
understand the primordial elements of significance hidden behind each motif has led me to refer
to research and by asking my grandmother about the possible meanings. The forms and shapes
represented in tattoos have been named with notions.
Tattoos are an ancient tradition. The native North African Berber ladies (Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania and the Western Sahara) have them done for various
motives. Berber tattoo designs are used as protection from the darker forces of life, to cure
illnesses and to protect oneself against evil spirits. Women placed symbols near body orifices
(eyes, mouth, nose, navel, vagina) or surfaces believed to be vulnerable to the invasion of evil,
such as feet, hands, and ankles (Tattoo). In the early twentieth century, North African tattoo and
especially Moroccan had served as a rite of passage, marking a girls transition into womanhood.
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When a girl reached puberty, sometime between the ages of eleven and fourteen, her mother,
aunts, or family friends would tattoo her face and wrists (Arizona). Another reason goes back to
the colonization era. Families hoped by tattooing their daughters faces, the French would find
them unattractive and thus prevent their abduction (Blogspot).
The patterns and symbols tattooed on North African women represent a meaningful life
of generations past, which revolved around artisanal activities and practices. For example, some
symbols refer to animals such as camels, gazelles and partridges, which were related to traveling
and hunting. Insects and food, such as, centipedes, bees, and wheat had various meanings as did
different shapes such as triangles, squares, and circles (Blogspot). The designs were passed from
mother to daughter. In some villages of Algeria, Berbers tattooed small diamond-shapes between
a childs eyes to keep the evil eye from the child. In Tunisia, the tattooed wheel was believed to
cure cancer. The large dots irregularly placed on the lower abdomen among Berber women, have
served to insure infertility, and the number of dots were related to the number of children they
had. The symbol combining a dog, a serpent hole, and the sun disc used by Algerian Yezidi
women were used to balance forces of good and evil. Each woman who carried one of the
symbols tells a story about her life.
Despite allusions to its prohibition in the Quran, tattooing has survived for centuries in
the Islamic societies of North Africa. Even though the last generation of tattooed women is
fading, the tradition lives on in other forms. The tattoos only fade from the bodies of women, but
the tradition has not completely disappeared. It remains in several aspects of the North African
cultures. Symbols used in tattooing are also found on dishes and woven into rugs. Some artists
like Lazhar Hakkar incorporate the tattoos in their artistic work like Magie, Regard de Nuit
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XXIV", and "Khemissa" (Aljazeera). The tradition also persists in music and poetry, discussing
tattooing and their connection to the land in lyrics.
Rachid Hamatou once said, There is no shadow of a doubt that man learned to draw
before writing. The tattooing, or permanent drawing of symbols, could very well have still been
used for the same purpose as writing, to tell a story, a story we can read through the skin of the
tattooed women. The North African patterns had caught my attention each time I looked at my
grandmother forehead and chin. These pieces of art mean something to me, something that
represent my identity as a Moroccan woman. Even though this art is fading because it has not
been passed on to younger generations, it still exists in many artistic forms and most importantly,
in the memories of the next generation.

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Works Cited
Aljazeera. Algeria's tattoos: Myths and truths. 11 August 2013. 15 July 2014.
Arizona, The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of. "The Culture and Arts of
Morocco and the Berbers." 2012. http://cmes.arizona.edu/. Website. 12 July 2014.
Blogspot, Numidya. North African/Amazigh Tattoos. 26 June 2013. 15 July 2014.
Tattoo, Vanishing. Tattooing in North Africa, The Middle East and Balkans. 2010. 15 July 2014.

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