Some tattoo designs are more ornate, with animal motifs similar to those seen on totem poles or other carvings on the Northwest Coast, representing whales, eagles, and other local species.
Straight lines and dots around joints or banded around limbs are common, as are simple geometric shapes. Tattooing in the north can vary widely, though there are a few common themes among the designs.
“When we see that ink on people, we know that we are healing from the historical trauma that occurred,” Tahbone says. A tradition that once served as therapy for body and mind might now, in its restoration, treat deep cultural wounds. As she and a handful of other researchers study and revitalize these lost arts, they are both reviving a cultural artform nearly wiped out by colonialism and getting a better understanding of the ways Indigenous communities in the north used tattoos. Thanks to people like Tahbone, herself a scholar and tattoo artist, traditional tattoos are reappearing in Arctic and Northwest Coast Indigenous communities. “You could tell a lot about where that person was from, what clan they belonged to, maybe what family they belonged to,” he says. Traditionally, chin tattoos among Inupiat women like Tahbone represented a number of different milestones, such as marriage, overcoming trauma, having kids, or, as in Tahbone’s case, a “coming of age.” According to anthropologist Lars Krutak, a research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, tattoos were closely tied up in the cultural identity of many Indigenous people. Lawrence Island,” says Yaari Kingeekuk Walker from the village of Savoonga in Alaska. “I wanted to help save the tattooing of St. “When I was acknowledged by babies, it was like an acknowledgment of my ancestors,” she says. When the infants touched her tattoo, Tahbone felt they were tapped into the memories of the past lives of deceased Inupiat. Among Inupiat communities, babies receive the names of the recently deceased. The infants’ actions had profound resonance. In the weeks to follow, on two different occasions, babies, whom Tahbone was holding and playing with, fingered the pattern on Tahbone’s face. In a local store, a village elder reached out and touched her tattoo. Within days of receiving her tattoo, people started to notice. Although many people there are Alaska Natives, traditional tattoos were a rare sight at that time. Nome is a town of about 3,800 people on Alaska’s northwestern coast, only reachable by plane or, in the warmer months, boat. Tahbone was unsure, however, how the people in her home village would react. Tahbone is Inupiat, an Alaska Native people, and the design was a traditional Inupiat pattern: three solid lines that spread downward from underneath the middle of her lower lip to her chin. To celebrate her graduation from the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Native Studies program in 2012, Marjorie Kunaq Tahbone got a tattoo.
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