Photo: Big Frank Dickinson
Big Frank is thinking tattoos. Look at that beautiful tattoo above. Big Frank met this woman, a tattoo artist, recently and her tattoos brought back the thought or getting a tattoo. He's been thinking about getting one for some time now and has a couple of designs in mind. Perhaps a black bar on one arm and a red bar on the other - on the forearms. Another possibility is yen yang; perhaps as one tattoo, not sure where, or separated with one on one arm and the other on another. Then there could be a kind of Maori bracelet that carries life significance in its symbols. Big Frank just isn't sure yet.
We think that tattooing is a contemporary fad, but in fact its been around for a very very long time. It has been a Eurasian practice for over 5,000 years. If you remember that so-called Iceman, Otzi the Iceman, who was found in the Austrian Alps a few years ago, he had 57 separate tattoos: a cross on the inside of his left knee, a number of straight lines on his abdomen, and lots of parallel lines on his back, legs and ankles.
Below is a tattoo of a Scythian chieftain from over 2,500 years ago; it was discovered on a mummy in Russia. Big Frank was like this one. It's a possibility.
