Ancient Siberian ice mummy is covered in ‘really special’ tattoos

Tattoos may have been widespread in prehistory, with scientists discovering a plethora of body art on a pastoralist who died in the 3rd or 4th century BC

By Chris Simms

31 July 2025

A 3D model of the tattooed mummy. The top image features textures derived from photographs that were captured using light visible to the human eye, while the bottom image’s textures were derived from photography in the near-infrared, which we cannot see

M. Vavulin

Elaborate tattoos featuring tigers, birds and a fantastical animal have been revealed on an ice mummy from more than 2000 years ago. The mummified woman was from the Pazyryk culture of Siberia, part of the wider Scythian world.

Knowing the prevalence of tattoos during prehistory is hard, because few bodies dating back that far still have skin on them. But there are a few notable exceptions, including Ötzi “the Iceman”, who lived about 3300 BC and was preserved in ice.

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Now, Gino Caspari at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and his colleagues have examined the body of a semi-nomadic Iron Age pastoralist from the Altai mountains in Siberia, who was aged about 50 when she died in the 3rd or 4th century BC. She is one of a handful of people in that area whose deep burial chambers were encased in permafrost, which turned them into “ice mummies”, preserving their skin, but leaving it dark and desiccated.