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Tribal Tattoo Designs Prominent

Oil painting of Pict family life by California artist Jeane Granada Coutts

In this painting, Jeane Coutts depicts an imaginary Pict family with tribal tattoo designs prominently displayed.  Jeane depicts Pict family life and society as she imagines it. Jeane, herself of Scotts decent, and in celebration of her heritage, researched the aborigines of Scotland, known as the Picts.  Her research turned up some surprises about this extremely strong, hardy, and artistic and tattooed people.

The Picts, the Tattooed Tribes of Scotland

See pictures of tattoos posted to Flickr

A brief introduction to the Picts, the Aborigines of Scotland

The Picts were the tattooed tribal nations of the north of Britain, the area now known as Scotland. In 600 AD, Isadore of Seville makes reference that the Picts took their name from the fact that their bodies had designs pricked into their skin by needles.

The Picts were known to have existed from about 7000BC until about the year 845 A.D. An interesting feature of Pict society was that the crown was passed using a matrileal basis; that is to say the crown was passed through the mother, and Pictish kings were not succeeded by their sons, but by their brothers or nephews or male cousins traced through the female line.

Historians have traced a complicated series of intermarriages by seven Pict royal houses. The end of the Pict royal bloodline came when the crown of Alba and the title "Rex Pictorum", King of the Picts, passed to a Celtic Scot by the name of Kenneth MacAlpin, a son of a Pictish princess.

Kenneth MacAlpin harbored familial hatred of the Picts arising from his father's kingship over the Scots being lost to the Pictish king Oengus, who had ruled as both King of Picts and Scots. In an act known as "MacAlpin's Treason", Kenneth murdered the members of the remaining seven royal houses thus securing the Alba throne for the Scots,  and the eventual erasure from history of the Pictish race, culture and history.

The Picts were fiercely anti-Roman, and a constant thorn in the side of occupying Rome. Although Rome engaged the Picts in constant battles, Rome never succeeded in subjugating either them or their land. The famous Hadrian's Wall, built by Emperor Hadrian was itself an ultimately futile attempt to keep the Picts from their frequent forays against the Romans in the south of Britain. The wall stretched 70 miles from east to west coasts, and extensions made to it by subsequent Roman leaders were all to no avail

The Romans referred to them in Latin as "Pictii", which translates as "The Painted Ones". This was in reference to the elaborate tribal tattoos with which the Picts decorated their entire bodies.

There is little known of the Picts today, which adds weight to the words of the Pictish chief, Calgacus, recorded by Roman writer, Eumenius; "We, the most distant dwellers upon the earth, the last of the free, have been shielded...by our remoteness and by the obscurity which has shrouded our name...Beyond us lies no nation, nothing but waves and rocks"

See pictures of tattoos posted to Flickr

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