Ethnographical collections from East Greenland. 6Q9 



the others above 12. Of the grown-up women 4 were without 

 markings. Of the men only one was tattooed, having two patches 

 on the upper part of the right arm. Strangely enough none of the 

 women had tattooings on the face or breast, but these were present 

 on arms and hands (about the legs nothing is reported) and con- 

 sisted mainly of bluish-black dots arranged in straight rows or 

 circles. One of the most tattooed women had on the back of the 

 four fingers of each hand a row of narrow, short, transverse lines 

 arranged longitudinally; on the back of the hand down from the 

 same fingers were three circles of close, roundish patches and con- 

 tinuing from there up along the arm to the elbow were five rows 

 of dots ending in a transverse line near the elbow. On the outer 

 side of the upper arm was a single row of thick, quite short lines, 

 one above the other. — In spite of the differences a close relation- 

 ship can be traced to the tattoo designs from Ammassalik, as seen 

 from the figures in this book; the squares of the latter enclosing a 

 dot are not mentioned in Meldorf's descriptions, nor are the lines 

 crossing each other like lattice or net-work or the ring-shaped lines 

 round the lower arm; but the rich use of regularly arranged dots 

 is common to all these east coast dwellers. The dots are probably 

 only substitutes for the short lines arranged in rows as mentioned 

 by Meldorf. 



These dots and lines on the arms I have only found again in tattooings 

 from the western side of Hudson Bay (Aivilik and Iglulik) illustrated by 

 Boas'^); here we also find ring-shaped lines round the arm and shoulder- 

 tattoings like those from Ammassalik (figs. 12 and 302). Otherwise tattoo mark- 

 ings on women's arms are only mentioned from St. Lawrence Island in the 

 Bering Straits where the pattern is formed by long lines (not short ones or 

 dots). 



Tattooings on the back of the hands and on the fingers (Graah, Glahn) 

 are seen in the above-mentioned illustration from Hudson Bay and on an- 

 other from Cumberland Sound in Baffin Land (both in Boas). The Iglulik 

 women marked their faces, arms, hands, thighs and some of them their 

 breasts, according to Parry ^). Outside these regions hand-tattooings do not 

 seem to have been used. 



The tattooing of the face on the other hand is universal among the 

 Eskimo women. Egede's above-cited description of the old-time face-tattooing 

 in Greenland seems to be in full agreement with the designs from Baffin 

 Land and Hudson Bay given by Boas, where the woman's face has two 

 lines between the eyebrows and up on the forehead, two or three curved 

 lines crossing the cheeks between the nostrils and the ears and 6 to 8 lines 

 spread out like a fan from the lower lip over the chin. From Alaska Nel- 

 son describes tattooings with illustrations and states, that the women here 



^) Boas (1901) p. 108, fig. 158. The standard description of the tattooing procedure 



is given probably by Lyon (1824) pp. 121 — 122 (kakeen). 

 2) Boas (1888) p. 561, fig. 516 and (1901) fig. 158. Parry (1824) p. 498. See also 



Stolpe (1896) pp. 19—20; Godfred Hansen (1912) fig. 21. 



XXXIX. 39 



