What do Berber tattoos mean?

An ancestral apply

Berber girls are recognized for his or her eager sense of aesthetics. Their colourful conventional garments and jewels simply stand out in opposition to the desert surroundings of Maghreb. 

Berber tattoos full this elegant and well-groomed look: these geometric indicators within the form of an arrow, a degree, or a triangle, cowl their faces, arms and ankles, the one uncovered components of their our bodies. 

Traces of this custom may be discovered since antiquity in Maghreb, which lasted till the Nineteen Fifties, earlier than the customized disappeared in favor of a extra fashionable and globalized model. That is the rationale why in the present day, solely the aged women are adorned with these drawings on their pores and skin, the final witnesses of this ancestral apply.

Indicators of magnificence and spirituality

However the place does this custom of tattooing on girls’s our bodies come from? The primary cause is primarily aesthetic: these graphic drawings that adorn their skins are meant to stay there for all times. It’s a form of pure and everlasting jewel, which doesn’t should be eliminated, which blends into the pores and skin and its pure wrinkles. 

However these physique designs even have an necessary symbolic dimension. Some marked an id belonging to a bunch, a household, a area. Others signified the marital standing of the girl who wears it: widow, single, or newly married. Nonetheless others represented animals symbolizing important values in Berber tradition, similar to fertility, knowledge or goodness.

“When a girl was unfortunate, she was given a tattoo,” says one in all these girls from a small village in southern Tunisia, in Myriam Mezclarte’s documentary on the subject. Within the Berber customized, the tattoo was additionally a method to relieve the evils, to remedy a misfortune, as a type of remedy. 

Right now, these aesthetic patterns are up to date by a number of manufacturers which might be impressed by their creations, such because the Algerian model Taszuri designer Rym, or by connaisseurs who don’t hesitate to reuse these designs to be tattooed too.