Stunning, eh? Margherita Bassi’s August 4, 2025 article for the Smithsonian Magazine provides more detail about the tattoos and the woman who wore them, Note Links have been removed,

Tigers, stags and a leopard twist around each other, the animals’ stylized and intricate details spread in ink across a woman’s forearm. On her hand is the delicate outline of a bird with a fluffy tail. It sounds like something you might see from a tattoo artist today, but these designs appear to be preserved on a more than 2,000-year-old “ice mummy” from Siberia’s Pazyryk culture.

The Pazyryk culture existed in the Altai Mountains—which extend through parts of Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan today—from the 6th to 2nd centuries B.C.E. Pazyryk people were horse riders associated with the nomadic Scythian culture, and they’re now known for carving petroglyphs and building frozen burial mounds called kurgans.

In a study published last week in the journal Antiquity, archaeologists used high-resolution digital imaging techniques to analyze the tattoos of a mummified Pazyryk woman like never before, shedding light on the craftsmanship and tools that such an artistic endeavor would have required.

…

Sheena Goodyear’s August 4, 2025 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) As It Happens radio programme takes a deep dive into the tattooing aspects of the story, Note: Links have been removed,

More than two millennia ago, a woman sat for hours on end in the ancient grasslands of a Siberian mountain range to have her body adorned with elaborate tattoos of creatures both real and mythical.

When she died, her body was preserved under the permafrost for thousands of years, but her tattoos faded and became invisible to the naked eye.

Now researchers have used high-resolution, near-infrared photography to bring those ancient tattoos back to life and worked with modern tattoo artists to shed light on the tools and techniques that made them possible to begin with.

“These tattoos are incredibly impressive,” Daniel Riday, a traditional tattoo artist from Les Eyzies, France, who worked on the research, told As It Happens guest host Rebecca Zandbergen. “This kind of research is almost a direct window into the past … and it’s very humbling to really be so close to the roots of this practice.”

…

‘A very technical skill’

Tattooing is a long-standing practice in many cultures around the world, with the oldest known tattoos dating back 5,300 years to Ötzi the Iceman, a prehistoric hunter whose tattoo-clad remains were found preserved in glaciers in the Italian Alps in 1991.

But it’s a difficult field to study because preserved tattoos on human flesh, like Ötzi’s, are exceedingly rare.

For this study, researchers looked at the remains of a 50-year-old woman from the Pazyryk culture, Iron Age pastoral people who lived in the Altai Mountains of Central and East Asia. She’s one of several  Pazyryk ice mummies whose remains were found preserved inside the mountain’s ice tombs in the 19th century.

…

Scientists have long known that the Pazyryk mummies were tattooed, but it was impossible to study the faded images in real detail.

“Prior scholarship focused primarily on the stylistic and symbolic dimensions of these tattoos, with data derived largely from hand-drawn reconstructions,” Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and the study’s senior author, said in a press release.

But three-dimensional scans of the Pazyryk woman’s tattoos have revealed them in stunning detail.

On her thumb sits a rooster with swirling tail-feathers. Her left arm bears a mythical griffon attacking a large stag, while an elaborate scene of leopards and tigers hunting two deer with intricate antlers is on her right forearm.

The latter, Riday said, is particularly impressive and likely would have taken two sessions of four or five hours each to complete.

“It’s graphic, it’s well placed, it’s imaginative. It’s really a masterpiece,” he said. “We think that the left arm was done by an artist of less skill, or maybe the same artist earlier in their career.”

…

The tattoos appear to have been done using a stick-and-poke technique, Riday said, which means someone used ink-dipped needles to create the images one single dot at a time.

The researchers suspect that small clusters of either thorns, or iron or bronze needles, dipped in a pigment of soot and animal fat were used.

It suggests, he said, the work of a true professional.

“It’s a very technical skill to create these kinds of tattoos, especially so long ago,” Riday said. “The person doing the tattoos would need to know what they’re doing and how to do it safely, and be able to create this sensational imagery that we’re seeing. It takes time and skill.”

…

Riday, a stick-and-poke artist, himself, said he’s currently working to recreate a tattoo needle in the style of the Pazyryk so he can tattoo one of the woman’s pieces onto his own body and learn more about the ancient technique.

He said it’s been amazing to connect with the deep history of his chosen profession.

…

Some of the information in this July 31, 2025 Antiquity Journal press release will seem familiar as it’s a source for the articles. Still, there are some new tidbits of interest,

An international team of archaeologists has used high-resolution digital imaging techniques to examine tattoos on an over 2000-year-old ice mummy from the Pazyryk culture of Siberia, shedding light on individual craftsmanship in prehistoric Siberian tattooing for the first time.

Tattooing was likely widespread during prehistory, but the lack of surviving tattoos means it is difficult to investigate. The so-called ‘ice mummies’ of the Altai mountains are an exception, since their deep burial chambers encased in permafrost sometimes preserve the skin (and therefore tattoos) of those buried within.

“The tattoos of the Pazyryk culture- Iron Age pastoralists of the Altai Mountains -have long intrigued archaeologists due to their elaborate figural designs”, states senior author of the research, Dr Gino Caspari from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern. 

Despite this, detailed studies of the tattoos are rare, as high-resolution images were not previously available. Therefore, most studies have been based on early schematic drawings of the tattoos.

“Prior scholarship focused primarily on the stylistic and symbolic dimensions of these tattoos, with data derived largely from hand-drawn reconstructions”, explains Dr Caspari. “These interpretations lacked clarity regarding the techniques and tools used and did not focus much on the individuals but rather the overarching social context.”

To provide a more accurate means to explore ancient tattooing, archaeologists produced a 3-dimensional scan of one tattooed Pazyryk mummy using newly available sub-millimetre resolution, digital near-infrared photography.

By working with modern tattooers, they examined the tattoos in greater detail than ever before, identifying the individual tools and techniques used to make them.

The researchers found that the tattoos on the right forearm were more detailed and technical than those on the left. This suggests that different tattooers, or the same tattooer during different stages of their development, contributed to the art.

Importantly, this indicates tattooing was not simply a form of decoration to the Pazyryk culture, but rather a skilled craft that required formal training and technical ability.

“The study offers a new way to recognize personal agency in prehistoric body modification practices”, says Dr Caspari. “Tattooing emerges not merely as symbolic decoration but as a specialized craft – one that demanded technical skill, aesthetic sensitivity, and formal training or apprenticeship.”

By identifying the individual hands behind ancient tattoos for the first time, the researchers show that prehistoric tattooers in Siberia were not unlike modern professionals today.

“This made me feel like we were much closer to seeing the people behind the art, how they worked and learned and made mistakes”, Dr Caspari concludes. “The images came alive.”

I am particularly interested in the imaging technique that made visualizing these tattoos possible, I have an excerpt from the paper following the link and citation offered here,

High-resolution near-infrared data reveal Pazyryk tattooing methods by Gino Caspari, Aaron Deter-Wolf, Daniel Riday, Mikhail Vavulin and Svetlana Pankova. Antiquity, Volume 99, Issue 407, October 2025 , pp. 1267 – 1281 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10150 First published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2025 © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd

This paper is open access.

Since floodlights with a wavelength of 850 nm were used, I have an excuse for including this research here. From the paper, Note: Links have been removed,

…

Methods

A three-dimensional digitisation of the female mummy from Pazyryk tomb 5 was carried out at the State Hermitage Museum using digital photogrammetry, including data in both the visible and near-infrared range. A modified Nikon D3100 camera with a dismantled hot mirror was used for near-infrared photography. Floodlights with a wavelength of 850nm were installed around the mummy during the shoot. The Agisoft Metashape software was used for photogrammetric processing, resulting in a 3D polygonal model of the mummy with two textures (Figure 1). The model is publicly accessible on Sketchfab, courtesy of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research in Archaeology (‘Artefact’) of the National Research Tomsk State University (https://skfb.ly/oVoEt).

…

The new digital imagery was compared with data from a recent experimental study examining the physical characteristics of tattoos created using different pre-electric techniques and tools (Deter-Wolf et al. Reference Deter-Wolf, Riday and Sialuk Jacobsen2022). In that investigation, a series of tattooing tools were created based on archaeological, historical and ethnohistorical data and used by one researcher (D. Riday) to tattoo their own leg with eight identical patterns. Each tattoo was created using a separate tool and/or technique and included both lines and filled areas. By monitoring and documenting these tattoos as they healed, investigators were able to distinguish specific physical differences between the marks, correlating to tool type and/or technique. The results of this experiment have subsequently been applied to the evaluation of tattooing techniques used on the Chalcolithic Iceman from the Tyrolean Alps, and on mummified bodies from the Andes in South America (Deter-Wolf et al. Reference Deter-Wolf, Robitaille, Riday, Burlot and Sialuk Jacobsen 2023 a, Reference Deter-Wolf, Robitaille, Fromme, Gerst and Riday 2024a & Reference Deter-Wolf, Auten, Robitaille, Riday, Manni and d’Errico b).

In a recent survey of global patterns of pre-electric tattooing technologies, Robitaille and colleagues (Reference Robitaille, Deter-Wolf, Sialuk Jacobsen, Manni and d’Errico 2024) describe a diversity of techniques used to insert pigments beneath human skin. Those are classified within two principal categories: puncture tattooing and tattooing by incision. Puncture tattooing takes place when the skin is pierced with a pointed implement that conveys pigment into the epidermis. Specific technologies within this category include both hafted and unhafted implements featuring one or more points. When applied directly to the skin by hand, these tools fall into the subcategory of ‘hand poking’. This technique is the most prevalent pre-electric tattooing method and appears historically on all continents except Australia and Antarctica (Robitaille et al. Reference Robitaille, Deter-Wolf, Sialuk Jacobsen, Manni and d’Errico 2024). A separate subcategory of puncture tattooing involves tools with one or more points that are hafted at an angle to the handle, which are struck into the skin with a secondary implement. This technique, today known as ‘hand tapping’, appears historically limited to Oceania, and portions of insular Southeast Asia, mainland Southeast Asia and the Himalayan slope (Robitaille Reference Robitaille, Gates St-Pierre and Walker 2007; Robitaille et al. Reference Robitaille, Deter-Wolf, Sialuk Jacobsen, Manni and d’Errico 2024). The final subcategory of puncture tattooing is subdermal tattooing, in which an eyed needle or awl is pushed horizontally through pinched skin to create adjacent wounds. Pigment is introduced into the opened channel on pulled thread or sinew, or on the tip of a second implement (Deter-Wolf et al. Reference Deter-Wolf, Riday and Sialuk Jacobsen 2022). Subdermal tattooing appears primarily among circumpolar cultures, as well as along North America’s Northwest coast, in Brazil and southern South America (Robitaille et al. Reference Robitaille, Deter-Wolf, Sialuk Jacobsen, Manni and d’Errico 2024). Tattooing by incision involves slicing the skin with a sharp implement such as a metal blade or lithic tool. Pigment is then introduced to the wound by rubbing in from the surface. Incision tattooing is historically documented on all continents except Antarctica and Australia, but as a global practice is much rarer than puncture tattooing (Robitaille et al. Reference Robitaille, Deter-Wolf, Sialuk Jacobsen, Manni and d’Errico 2024).

…

As academic papers go, this is quite accessible.