Culture and symbols

The tattoos of the women

A visual language that disappeared within a century

Dots, lines and diamonds on the face and on the hands: read by everyone, explained by almost nobody anymore.

In old photographs from North Africa almost all older women wear signs on their faces: a line from the edge of the lower lip to the chin, dots on the forehead, patterns on the backs of the hands and on the ankles. Anyone who looks for these women today hardly finds them. The tradition broke off in the course of the 20th century.

What they meant

The signs did several jobs at once. They protected: against the evil eye, against illness, against misfortune in childbirth. They marked transitions, above all the one into adulthood and the one into marriage. And they assigned belonging: group, region, sometimes family. A woman could be recognized by her signs, the way a carpet can be by its pattern.

The forms

Always geometric, never pictorial: dots, strokes, crosses, diamonds, combs, zigzags. The same elements that also turn up on silver and in wool. Tattooing was done with a needle and soot, mostly by older women, mostly on young girls.

Why they disappeared

Several things came together. Ideas of beauty changed, life in the cities set new standards, and the sign that once meant belonging soon came to seem old-fashioned. Many women later had their tattoos removed or cover them.

The return as a quotation

Today the same patterns are appearing again: on the forearms of young people in the diaspora, in henna instead of soot, as ornament and as avowal. That is not the same thing as back then. But it is not nothing either: it is the attempt to bring back a visual language whose last readers are dying right now.