Religion is a human beings’ relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine. Religion is
commonly regarded as consisting of a person’s relation to God, or to gods or spirits,
but it also encompasses one’s moral conduct, attitudes, beliefs, and practices.
For many, religion is a guiding light — a blueprint as to how to live life.
Religious tattoos are one way for a person to express their devotion or faith and
the art of tattooing has been connected to religion for centuries. For the Mayas,
Incas and Aztecs tattooing played an important role in their religious rituals.
For the Ainu, original inhabitants of Japan, tattooing was associated with
magical beliefs.
The Polynesians, more than any other race, were responsible for the widest
distribution of tattooing, developing in New Zealand a new style, Moko,
which consisted of many patterns associated with religious rites and taboo beliefs.
Even the Church encouraged tattooing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
though this was confined to the Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox denominations.
Today many priests of the Coptic Church are tattooed, and religious designs
tattooed on the forearm or chest have been traditional for two centuries with the
Serbians, Bulgarians and Catholic Eurasians.
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