Did ancient Celtic warriors actually have tattoos?

The truth behind an iconic warrior image

If you run a search on Google Images or Pinterest for “Celtic warrior,” you’ll see image after image of half-naked fighters with long hair, swords, and skin covered in swirling blue tattoos.

One such example of a “Celtic warrior”

You’ll find the same thing in modern media—films like Centurion and King Arthur, shows like Rome, and games such as Ryse: Son of Rome or Rome: Total War. Even much of modern tattoo culture is steeped in this aesthetic of Celtic knots and crosses, spirals, wolves, boars, and bears.

I’ve drawn on that iconography myself. In Son of the Thunder Goddess, the demigod Saorlach fights bare-chested, covered in tattooed blue runes that prevent his skin from being damaged.

A closeup of Saorlach from the front cover of Son of the Thunder Goddess

But all of this raises an important question: did the ancient Celts actually tattoo themselves?

Historians have debated this for decades. As with most things related to Iron-Age Celtic culture, our sources come, not from the Celts themselves, but from Greek and Roman writers who often portrayed them as barbarians to emphasize their otherness.

One of the most famous classical descriptions of body coloration comes from Julius Caesar’s Gallic War:

All the Britons, indeed, dye themselves with woad, which occasions a bluish color, and thereby have a more terrible appearance in fight.¹

As Charles W. MacQuarrie points out, there is some ambiguity in the Latin verb inficere (translated as “dye”) which could refer to body painting rather than tattooing. Other ancient sources, however, “refer specifically to tattooing, puncturing as distinct from painting.”²

One such writer is Gaius Julius Solinus. In his Polyhistor, he says:

For the most part, Britain is held by barbarians. Even from childhood, they are marked by local artists with various figures and images of animals. When a man’s body has been inscribed, the marks of the pigment increase with growth. The wild nations in this place consider nothing to be greater proof of patience than that through the unforgetful scars, their bodies may drink in the most dye.³

But while the insular⁴ Celtic practice of tattooing is well-attested in ancient classical sources, the prevailing view among historians in the early 20th century seems to have been one of skepticism, dismissing the accounts of Caesar, Solinus, and others as mere fantasy.

MacQuarrie explains that much of this skepticism came from a cultural prejudice against tattoos. Because tattoos were considered vulgar, low-class, or even “primitive,” many scholars were reluctant to believe their ancestors tattooed themselves.

These days, however, we have the opposite bias, and MacQuarrie observes that “many people now seem to very much want the Celts to have been tattooed,” a desire that similarly risks our objectivity as we examine historical sources.⁵

Weighing both textual and archeological evidence, MacQuarrie concludes:

In contrast to the received wisdom of many moderns, post-moderns, and even modern primitives, no classical author makes the claim that the Celts, generally speaking, were tattooed; on the other hand there is evidence in both classical and medieval sources that tattooing was customary among at least some tribes of insular Celts.⁶

In addition to the textual evidence of writers like Caesar and Solinus, we do also have some archeological evidence of tattooing among ancient European peoples.

Since the 1940s, several embalmed Scythian bodies have been discovered in Siberia, including the elaborately tattooed Pazyryk chief (5th century BC). While not Celtic, these finds show that tattooing was present among other Indo-European peoples of roughly the same era, suggesting, in MacQuarrie’s words, “that the classical accounts are perhaps, in this respect at least, not so fantastic after all.”⁷

Pazyryk tatoo design with zoomorphic symbols, 4th century BCE

So where does all this leave us?

The evidence isn’t absolute. We’re lacking in material, archaeological evidence from the British Isles and must contend with the accounts of biased ancient authors (and biased modern historians). But between classical sources like Caesar and Solinus, later medieval references, and archaeological parallels, we have enough to say confidently that there is a strong historical basis for the iconic image of the ancient Celtic warrior with blue tattoos.

And for my own purposes as a fantasy writer, it allows for some very interesting worldbuilding and character choices.

1. Caesar, Gallic War, 5.14.

2. Charles W. MacQuarrie, “Insular Celtic Tattooing: History, Myth and Metaphor,” Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, Edited by Jane Caplan, Princeton University Press, 2021., p. 35.

3. Sollinus, Polyhistor, 22:12.

4. Insular refers to the Celtic peoples of Brittany and the British Isles.

5. MacQuarrie, p. 34.

6. MacQuarrie, pp. 34-35.

7. MacQuarrie, p. 35.