Archive Note
The Iranian plateau has a documented body-marking record stretching back more than two thousand years, but it is not one continuous tradition: the earliest written attestations come from fifth-century BCE Greek sources, the famous figurative tattoos of the Pazyryk frozen mummies of the Altai belong to Iranian-speaking Saka nomads of the steppe rather than to the Persians of the plateau, and the best-documented strand is the women's khalkubi tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Khalkubi marks were mostly geometric, dots, lines, crosses, eyebrow-bridging lines, and imitation jewelry, placed on the forehead, chin, cheek, throat, and body, predominantly in blue, and served overlapping purposes of beauty, warding off the evil eye, fertility, and tribal identification. The practice was widespread among tribal, rural, and lower-class women and was performed by barbers in the public baths and by itinerant practitioners, declining through the mid-twentieth century mainly through urbanization and changing fashion rather than any single ban. On November 26, 2000 the Islamic Republic of Iran banned tattooing on public-health grounds, but a thriving underground scene operates in Tehran and other cities, and "Woman, Life, Freedom" tattoos surfaced during the 2022 to 2023 protests following Mahsa Amini's death in custody.