When does enough become too much? Prior to Tunisia we’d been to Mexico, Cuba, and Morocco, and I’d gotten tattoos in two of those three locations. Worse, a lapse in judgement had the Mexican tattoo sneaking onto the back of my hand. Now every job interview will be laced with shame.

My Mexican and Moroccan tattoos are ink representations of images that are culturally relevant to their place of origin. I have a traditional Oaxacan embroidery pattern from Mexico and a henna-inspired Moroccan piece. But while the motifs are site specific, neither location has a history of rendering them as tattoos.

I think that may be tool-related. The primary method of traditional Berber tattooing involved incising lines with a sharp blade, where it’s harder to accurately make a curved shape than a straight one. Those same symbols were used in rugs, where the primitive looms also made curved shapes more difficult to execute. The methods used to disseminate these symbols may well have constrained the visual language itself.

While that’s a plausible theory, there’s no way to definitively say whether it’s true or not. That makes it true!

The Heart Wants What It Wants

I’d been craving a Berber tattoo ever since the first rug dealer we met in Tunis explained that the rug motifs actually originated as tattoos. But when I broached the idea to Dorothy she voted nay.

Her completely logical points were: A) I already had a North African tattoo, so it would be redundant, and B) it would dramatically reduce the available real estate for future tattoos, and how would I feel in Southeast Asia or Turkey when I craved another piece and couldn’t find room? All very logical.

Plus, I’d been trying to locate a local tattoo artist, and I hadn’t found anyone who seemed to really know the Berber tattoos. They all did some variations, but no one seemed to be a specialist. My concern wasn’t design or proficiency, it was meaning. It’s like that thing where you go to an artist for a Chinese ideogram and you’re assured it means Power, and then you meet a native Chinese speaker who asks you why you have the word for Chicken tattooed on your arm. That thing.

Admittedly, once we leave the Maghreb the odds of running across a Berber native who’d ask me why I had chickens tattooed on my arm seemed low. But the point was respect, not cosplay, so I needed some confidence that the design would be appropriate. And not for nothing, disagreeing with Dorothy about the visual arts is pretty stupid. All signs pointed to no Berber tattoo.

Then two things happened. First, we toured the Sahara, which immersed us in Berber culture in ways that hanging out in Tunis didn’t. And holy shit, that culture is rich, deep, and surpassingly beautiful. It made my heart ache to think how enriched American culture would be if we hadn’t so thoroughly devastated and subjugated the native peoples. I wanted to celebrate a still vibrant Berber culture in the only way I know how: by using myself as a canvas.

Finding The Maestro

The second thing that happened was finding Manel Mahdouani. qartaj.com is a commerce site for Tunisian crafts, but they also blog, and we found a post on Amazigh symbolism that cited Manel as the modern expert on Berber tattoos. I was able to track her down and we met for a consultation.

That turned into a wide-ranging, delightful two-hour long conversation that veered from tattoos to colonialism, with stops along the way for stories about her month in America (a truly epic road trip, from DC to Oregon and back) and my family’s emigration from Ukraine to the US.

But as much as I enjoyed the conversation on its own merits, it’s what she had to say about Berber tattoos that hit home. It turns out she’s as much ethnographer as tattoo artist, traveling the Sahara and documenting the tattoos of the people she meets. There’s a great documentary about her from five years ago, although it’s in French. Even if you scrub through the talking, the video of her meeting Berbers and cataloging tattoos is more than worth it.

One of the interesting things she’s learned through her research is that it’s impossible to put together a definitive codex. Different tribes often ascribe a different meaning to the same symbol. She’s documenting as much of that variation as she’s able to uncover, but there will never be One Truth about the meaning of the symbols.

However, it’s her reasons for undertaking the ethnographic research that are so compelling. Manel is Berber through and through. Her grandmother had traditional Berber tattoos, but her mother didn’t, and Manel didn’t get inked up as a child, either. She said her mother’s was the generation that looked on the tattooing with shame, breaking the chain through which the culture had been passed down over centuries. Rather than being seen as emblematic of their heritage and traditions, the tattoos had sadly come to represent backwardness.

Manel told me that in her travels, the youngest tattooed woman she met was thirty, and she’d grown up fully nomadic. But her daughter attended school, and she wasn’t tattooed. Even in the desert, it would have engendered bullying that she didn’t want her daughter to endure.

Which means that traditional Berber tattooing isn’t a dying art. It’s a dead art. It’s like an oral tradition that stops being transmitted when children aren’t interested in the old ways, except in this case it’s the parents intentionally killing the culture. Manel is preserving the history and meaning of this art form before its last followers die out, leaving nothing behind.

So if I was on the fence about getting a Berber tattoo, and I wasn’t, this sealed the deal. I’d be transforming something ephemeral into something permanent, and participating, in my own small way, in the preservation of a centuries old tradition.

There’s a potential silver lining to all of this. The generation that couldn’t be bothered to hear about the old ways often spawns a generation hungry for knowledge about their heritage. Manel represents an almost radical Berber pride (you should have seen her eyes when she talked about Arab colonialism) that itself represents the seeds of regeneration. She can’t possibly be alone, and if enough of her cohort feel the need to reconnect with their origins, Berber tattooing may well come back. Manel is preserving the art form, but with luck it’s being preserved as if in amber, just waiting for its DNA to be extracted and brought back to vibrant life.

But What About My Tattoo?

In discussing my tattoo, we looked through a ton of Manel’s source material: books, photographs, and her original research. We discussed the meaning of the different symbols, and we settled on grounding my piece on iconography associated with strength and protection. No fertility symbols. Nothing girly. We made an appointment for later that week to do the work, with a promise to send me a design for approval beforehand.

I could not imagine having notes for her on the design. At this point I wanted a piece by Manel as much as I wanted a Berber design. The integrity of her work is amazing, and whatever she wants to do will be the right thing to do. If she came back to me with a motif of chickens, I’d say yes, and unapologetically defend it to anyone asking why I had Berber chickens tattooed on my arm.

I’d brought Manel several pictures I’d scraped online as inspiration. Here’s the one that most thoroughly captured what caught my eye about the Berber designs. Manel’s design is first and foremost about the meaning of the symbols she chose based on our conversation. Then it’s about finding an appropriate and harmonious balance of those elements. As expected, no notes. And no chickens. Home run.

Each of the components of the tattoo has a specific meaning.

Which I got from Manel’s explanation.

This site has information about many of the other Berber symbols, but not all of the ones Manel used.

And, the final result. A tattoo I’m proud to have. Thanks so much to Manel, for a beautiful tattoo and a great experience. I’m proud to carry a little piece of Berber heritage with me wherever I go.