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Placement · placement_face

Face

The face. THE ONLY PLACEMENT IN THIS BATCH WITH A TIER 1 DOCUMENTED RESTRICTION ON IT: “Around AD 325, however, the Emperor Constantine outlawed tattooing of the face because he believed that the face was in God's image and should not be disfigured.” The same museum records the practice that preceded it: “Early Christians often had the sign of the cross tattooed on their bodies, particularly their face or arms.”
Thin
Medium confidenceneeds cultural review

No links4 sources · T1

Cultural review required

This entry makes claims about a community's practice that nobody qualified has confirmed. Treat it as research in progress, not settled fact.

What the research says

placement_anatomy
Category
head_and_neck
Available area
Small, highly individual, and dominated by features. No fetched source describes its usable area.
Cultural flags
ROUTED, NOT ENCODED. The Constantine edict is recorded because a Tier 1 museum makes a documented historical claim inside its own subject area - the same licence that allowed motif_cross while still refusing the shark sacred claim. It is a fourth-century Roman imperial law, not a living tradition. PLACEMENT RESTRICTIONS THAT LIVING COMMUNITIES PRACTISE - facial tattooing traditions above all - ARE T11.10 WORK AND NOTHING ABOUT THEM IS WRITTEN HERE. A trade source stating that placements carry no meaning does not settle that question and is not used to.
Tattooability notes
“Thin skin on the hands and face could result in blowouts (which will create a “blurry tattoo”)”. The cited education source sets a seniority bar: “Until you’ve had at least three years of experience with professional tattooing, it’s best not to tattoo areas that are so hard to cover.”
Conflicts or cautions
The cited trade source groups face with hand and neck as work that “change the way you are treated by others”.

Provenance

4 resolved

  • Facts about tattoos (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 1

    Royal Museums Greenwich

    National Maritime Museum page. Verbatim: the word 'tattoo' is "derived from the Tahitian word 'tatau', meaning to mark"; a pig and a rooster tattooed on the feet were "said to protect a seaman from drowning"; a full-rigged ship, an anchor, a dragon and a shellback turtle each record a specific voyage or crossing. Establishes protective (apotropaic) intent inside the tattoo domain.

    museum · retrieved 2026-08-28

  • Tattoos in Europe: from slaves and sailors to kings and tsars (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 1

    Royal Museums Greenwich

    National Maritime Museum page. Verbatim: "Tattoos have adorned the highest born royals and the lowliest sailor in Europe for at least 5,000 years." Records Christian cross tattoos, Constantine's ban on facial tattooing around AD 325 and the 1862 Jerusalem Cross of the Prince of Wales. UPDATED BY T11.8c - the earlier note on this row said the religious material was left to T11.10, and that is no longer true, so it is corrected rather than left contradicting the data. motif_crucifixion now cites this page for “Much later, a representation of the crucifixion tattooed on a slave's back was said to preserve the bearer from a whipping.” A Tier 1 museum making a documented historical claim inside its own subject area is exactly what Tier 1 may establish. What stays routed to T11.10 is CONTEMPORARY DEVOTIONAL PRACTICE, which this page does not discuss.

    museum · retrieved 2026-08-30

  • The Hardest Areas to Tattoo on the Body (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 2

    Tattooing 101

    Professional tattoo-education page, and the only fetched source that treats placement as a SKIN problem rather than a layout problem. Supplies the batch tattooability content: skin thickness over bone (“when you’re tattooing over a bone, like a collarbone, the skin is going to be thinner than on the arm, so you won’t want to go in as deep with a tattoo needle”), loose skin at the armpit and stomach, the rib-stretch problem, blowouts on thin skin, and movement-driven fading on hands. It also states the nerve-density asymmetry: “the outer arm has fewer nerve endings than the inner arm, making tattoos hurt worse on the inner arm”. LIMIT: it is written for the beginning tattooer, so its rankings are about difficulty of execution and not about what a placement can hold.

    professional tattoo source · retrieved 2026-08-30

  • Tattoo Placement Chart (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 2

    Tattooing 101

    Professional tattoo-education page and the primary placement source for this batch. It is the only fetched source that bands EVERY body area by the size of work it holds - small, medium, large and extra-large - which is what makes the available_area and scale_behavior columns answerable at all. It also supplies the fit rule (“a forearm tattoo shouldn’t wrap so far around the arm that it overlaps”), the design-expansion warning, and two orientation rules. IMPORTANT NEGATIVE FINDING, recorded because it bears directly on what this corpus may claim: the page states “Tattoo placements don’t have any specific meaning tied to them.” That is a Tier 2 trade claim about the modern Western commercial context in which the page is written. IT DOES NOT AND CANNOT SETTLE whether placement carries meaning or restriction in any cultural tradition - two Tier 1 museum sources in this same batch record placements that do. The claim is recorded, scoped, and NOT used to suppress a cultural placement rule anywhere in the corpus.

    professional tattoo source · retrieved 2026-08-30

Related concepts

0 links

No relationship in the corpus touches Face. The graph is sparse; the type listings carry browsing.