Berber Tattooing: in Morocco's Middle Atlas

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This trunk tattoo symbolises the rootedness and connexion between the earth, the sky, the divine, and the world and earth energy.

They view these tattoos as a relevant rite of passage which are added at key stages in their lives. The ‘siyala’ is drawn on the chin. It symbolises the palm tree. The first phase can be seen in the chin markings. "Siyala," as they are called, were often inked from the lip to the chin in a form that represented a palm tree and seeds. This book was a labor of love and looking through his flash drawings and photographs of tattoos of course brought up many memories of our tattoo years together. We were a united couple and family, we were our own bosses, working when we needed to and taking time off when we chose to. We loved the freedom tattooing gave us. It was hard work but also exciting and fun. We worked in our own home and every day was made different by the interesting variety of people from all walks of life that we got to meet. We lived for many years without a TV. The vertical chief attribute represents god and life, as well as the head tool planted in the ground by man Amnay is wrong. Nomadic Arabs (also known as Bedouins) in the Middle East had tattoos as well. They clearly didn't get them from Berbers since there is no known major Berber migration into the Middle East. This means they both have this facial tattoo as part of their culture as a result of Arabs teaching it to Berbers or more likely both groups share a common ancestor culture which would be prehistoric.

Berbers used to live in several Berber regions of North Africa, and they often lived in the mountainous and desert areas.

Traces of this tradition can be found since antiquity in Maghreb, which lasted until the 1950s, before the custom disappeared in favor of a more modern and globalized style. This is the reason why today, only the elderly women are adorned with these drawings on their skin, the last witnesses of this ancestral practice.

The Berber tattoo was totally different from what we see today, it had several meanings and several patterns, each one has its own definition, but today this modern tattoo we see, is not mine, it comes from other countries and young people prefer it and do it too," says Masoudi. Felix was ahead of his time in his art and an individualist in his lifestyle. The younger generation of tattooers knows little to nothing about his story in tattooing and I feel that I am the best person to tell it. In August 2018 my daughter Aia Leu, the publisher of seedpress.ie, encouraged me to put together the material I had begun to gather about Felix’s tattooing. She would then publish it. We had collaborated on “Berber Tattooing in Morocco’s Middle Atlas” in 2017 and we worked well together once again on this book. Together we chose the format, paper, fonts and worked out the layout. I wrote some texts and we included Felix’s own words in excerpts of interviews he had given. With her help and a lot of hard work on both our parts the book came to life.

Spiritual virtues: Berber tattoos are known to have a purifying nature, according to the Amazigh people they have the ability to purify body and soul. Spiritually, they represent sacrifices for the purification and redemption of the soul, the tattoo would act as a bridge between the body and the spirit aiming to attain spiritual fullness. For women, they might be applied at the onset of puberty or to communicate marital status and other social information. A number of motifs were common amongst Amazigh women’s tattoos, including symbols of the sun, an eye of a partridge, a chain and flies. In Berber culture, the partridge was associated with grace and beauty, and its eyes symbolise the omnipresence of danger.

The first of the facial tattoos is called ‘siyala’ and is on the chin. Siyala often takes the form of a symbolic palm tree tattoo which consists of a simple straight line from the bottom of the lip to the bottom of the chin. This line would sometimes be flanked by dots representing seeds. These areas of the body were perceived to require protection from the ‘Jnoun’ ( bad spirits) which may try to enter her body and possess her. Not all stories of the tattooed women are benign. The sad history of the decimation and captivity of Armenians under their Muslim captors holds the story of stolen Armenian girls tattooed by their captors a story told in history and photos in the Genocide Museum. Some Bedouin tribes also believe that markings will cure them of ailments, and symbols such as dots on the side of the head or above their eyes are said to heal a person's aches and pains.