The oldest known tattoo tools have been discovered!

Ancient tattoo tools are hard to find or even recognize as tools for creating designs on the skin, but new microscopic studies of two sharp-ended turkey leg bones indicate that Native Americans used these items to make tattoos between 5,520 and 3,620 AD. years ago. Can you believe it?

These pigment-dyed bones are the world’s oldest known tattooing tools, the find suggests that Native American tattooing traditions in eastern North America date back more than a millennium earlier than previously thought or known.

Excavations in 1985 revealed these turkey bones and other items from a probable tattoo kit in a man’s burial pit at the Fernvale, Tennessee site. The damage at and near the tips of the two turkey leg bones resembles distinctive wear previously observed on experimental tattoo tools made from deer bones. In that research, the lines tattooed on fresh slabs of pigskin were produced by a series of punctures with tools that had the tips covered with homemade ink, this experimental tattoo left traces of ink several millimeters from the tips of the tools, a pattern that is also found with residues of red and black pigments on Fernvale tools.

Two turkey wing bones found in the same Fernvale grave show microscopic wear and residue from the application of pigment during the tattoo, scientists say. The pigment-stained seashells in the tomb may have had solutions in which tattoo artists dipped tools.