From about A.D. 1200 to 1600, Native Americans speaking very different languages and living across a vast swath of what is now the United States followed similar religious practices known today as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. According to David H. Dye of the University of Memphis, who has studied both ritual depictions on artifacts and the Native American oral traditions, tattooing was a vital part of these shared religious ideas. “They played a role in celebrating the perpetuation of life,” says Dye. “For warriors, facial tattoos were snares for capturing the soul of someone they killed in battle. Capturing those enemy souls through permanent tattoos helped extend not only their own lives, but helped ease the passage of their dead relatives.” Much of the evidence for tattooing comes from ceramic pots that depict heavily tattooed human heads. These vessels were often decorated with bird motifs, which seem to relate to the Birdman, a deity who ensured the daily rebirth of the sun and symbolized the triumph of life over death. Often these tattoos took the form of feathers or raptor claws around the eyes. “By tattooing themselves with bird motifs, they became that supernatural creature,” says Aaron Deter-Wolf of the Tennessee Division of Archaeology. “The tattoos enabled them to embody his force.”

For more than 1,000 years, a culture flourished in what are now the western Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and parts of Colima. Most of what we know about the culture comes from artifacts taken from shaft tombs—usually by tomb raiders—including examples of heavily tattooed hollow ceramic figurines. Some scholars believe the figurines depict gods, while Christopher Beekman of the University of Colorado Denver suspects that they may in fact represent the people with whom they were buried. Certainly the designs were intended to communicate identity and status, particularly considering that the figurines appear to have been used in ceremonial contexts, and also set up in residential areas to be seen and visited. According to Beekman, it is notable that the tattooing occurs prominently around the mouth, which may refer, as it does in Classic Maya society, to the breath of life or the capacity of polished speech of these individuals.

An indigenous people known as the Ibaloi once mummified their honored dead and laid them to rest in hollowed logs in the caves around what is now the Filipino municipality of Kabayan. In life, these ancient people had won the right to be covered in spectacular tattoos depicting geometric shapes as well as animals such as lizards, snakes, scorpions, and centipedes. “According to nineteenth-century ethnographic accounts, Ibaloi head-hunting warriors revered these creatures as ‘omen animals,’” says Smithsonian anthropologist and tattoo scholar Lars Krutak. “The sight of one before a raid could make or break the entire enterprise.” After successfully taking the head of an enemy in battle, a warrior would have these propitious animals permanently etched onto his body. Some Kabayan mummies also feature less fearsome tattoos, such as circles on their wrists thought to be solar discs, or zigzagging lines variously interpreted as lightning or stepped rice fields. “All these tattoos seem to depict the surrounding environment,” says Krutak, who notes that the increased attention paid to the mummies in the last decade has helped fuel a resurgence in traditional tattooing, which had largely died out. Today, thousands of people tracing their descent to the ancient Ibaloi wear designs on their skin modeled after those of their ancestors.