Ancient & modern
The ancients did not go in for bodypiercing, but tattooing was widely practised. Our first evidence for tattooing comes from Egypt, where mummies of the Eleventh Dynasty (c.2000 Bc) have been found tattooed with a blackish pigment. This may well have been for erotic purposes - the Egyptians getting there first, as usual. Tattooing for religious purposes was known to the Israelites, Syrians and Egyptians (among whom an escaped slave who dedicated himself to the god with a tattoo could not be reclaimed).
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Greeks and Romans knew all about this. Aetius (6th century AD) tells us how tattoos were applied - `by pricking with needles, wiping away the blood and rubbing in first juice of leek, and then the preparation’.
But this was not the sort of thing free men went in for. Tattoos were a sign of degradation, practised by barbarians such as the Thracians (they liked deer tattoos), the Mossynoeci (`entirely decorated back and front with flowers’) and Britons (all kinds of designs, including animal pictures: ‘Pict’, Latin pictus, means ‘painted’). Tattoo removal was regularly practised by doctors in imperial Rome as a service to those who wanted to hide their foreign origins.
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Nonetheless, tattooing did have a function among Greeks and Romans, mainly penal. Slaves were tattooed (comedians frequently mention it: there is a reference to a `three-needle’, i.e. three-colour, job). Some had `Stop me, I’m a runaway’ written on their foreheads. Criminals were tattooed, and in the late Roman empire soldiers and military workers were too, presumably to prevent those indentured to the state from deserting. Prisoners of war could also receive the treatment.
The Greek word for tattoo is stigma. Contrary to popular belief, stigma virtually never refers to branding, which was almost entirely confined to animals. But this surely is the best way ahead for the animal-loving royals. As the selfmutilation habit spreads among them, and the upper classes in general, they could announce their difference by branding themselves instead of indulging in those frightful lower-class tattoos and studs.