Puncture tattooing (hand-poke tattooing)

This video shows tattoo artist Danny Riday tattooing his own leg using a bone awl made from white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). This variety of puncture tattooing, colloquially known as “hand poke” or “stick and poke” tattooing, involves the use of a sharp implement either held directly in the hand or hafted to the end of a handle.

This tattooing was done in 2021 as part of an experiment designed to evaluate the physical signatures of tattoos created with different pre-electric tools. That study was funded in part by John Kiernan and an EXARC Experimental Archaeology Award, and published in the EXARC journal (https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10654). The video was uploaded to Figshare as supplemental material to accompany the article “Chalcolithic Tattooing: Historical and Experimental Evaluation of the Tyrolean Iceman’s Body Markings” (Aaron Deter-Wolf, Benoît Robitaille, Danny Riday, Aurélien Burlot, and Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, European Journal of Archaeology, 2024, DOI: 10.1017/eaa.2024.5).