The ancient designs, found on pre-Columbian mummies from Peru, give modern tattoos a run for their money.
Ancient Peruvian tattoos photographed under white light, in infrared images, or in LSF images to highlight the additional details visible in the latter.If tattoos are prone to fading within a single human lifetime, imagine the wear-and-tear on the tattoos of 1,200-year-old mummies.
The recent team used a technique called laser-stimulated fluorescence , which uses lasers to reveal details within soft tissue, to study the tattoos on Peruvian mummies. Paleontologists have used LSF for years to study dinosaur remains, according to, but this marks the first time the technique has been used to analyze ancient tattoos on mummified human remains—and the results were fantastic.
Though most of the tattoos on the Chancay mummies were “amorphous patches with poorly defined edges,” some of the designs had lines between 0.0039 and 0.0079 inches thick, the researchers wrote in the study. These details “reflect the fact that each ink dot was placed deliberately by hand with great skill, creating a variety of exquisite geometric and zoomorphic patterns,” they added.
“The study therefore reveals higher levels of artistic complexity in pre-Columbian Peru than previously appreciated, which expands the degree of artistic development found in South America at this time,” the researchers explained.
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