Inked Heritage: Exploring Kurdish Women’s Tattoo Tradition

When you travel through the Kurdish mountains, from the stony villages of Mardin to the green valleys of Duhok, you may notice something striking on the faces of elderly women sitting in courtyards or at the edge of markets: faded blue marks pricked into the skin. These are not random blemishes or accidents of age, but the remains of a tradition known as deq or xal — a form of tattooing once widespread among Kurdish women. Each dot and line is a carefully chosen symbol, a sign both personal and communal. To those who carry them, the tattoos are living archives that bind beauty, protection, and memory to the skin itself.

The marks may look simple—rows of dots across the chin, stars at the corner of the eye, rosettes on the hand—but behind each motif lies a world of meaning. In many Kurdish villages, tattoos were more than decoration; they were cosmic signs, fragments of an older language connecting the human body to the universe. A circle might echo the sun, a crescent the moon, a star the eternal cycles of night and day. Triads of dots mirrored the sacred number three, resonant in Kurdish cosmology as a balance of earth, sky, and underworld. These tattoos were often seen as miniature cosmograms, a way to inscribe on the body the order of the cosmos, ensuring harmony and protection for the wearer.

The roots of this practice reach deep into antiquity, and many scholars and elders point to the Yezidi tradition as one of its major sources. The Yezidis, whose spiritual practices are among the oldest in Kurdistan, maintained a worldview saturated with reverence for celestial bodies and cycles of nature. For Yezidi women especially, tattooing was not only ornamentation but a sacred act, binding the body to cosmic order. The sun, central in Yezidi ritual life, often appeared in tattoo form as a rosette on the hand or chest. The crescent, echoing the cycles of the moon, could be found near the eyes or on the ankle. Over time, these motifs traveled beyond strictly Yezidi communities and were adapted by Kurdish Muslim and even some Christian Assyrian tribes, where they were reframed as protective charms or emblems of beauty, yet their cosmic essence still shimmered beneath the surface.

Just as significant as the cosmological meanings were the tribal variations. Different Kurdish tribes cultivated their own repertoire of symbols, passed down from one generation to the next. In some regions, crosses marked the skin, not necessarily as Christian symbols, but as tribal emblems or charms against the evil eye. Among other groups, the comb or ladder motif was prized, thought to guide growth, fertility, and ascent toward prosperity. Some tribes favored animal symbols—the scorpion to guard against venom and harm, or the gazelle as a wish for grace and beauty. Still others used linear arrangements of dots to signal clan identity, allowing women to be recognized across villages without speaking a word. To read the deq of an elder woman was, in a sense, to read her genealogy, her affiliations, her prayers, and her universe all at once.

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The making of these tattoos was a ritual in itself. Usually, an elder woman with skill and knowledge acted as the tattooist, preparing a pigment of soot or ash mixed with milk or plant sap. With a needle or thorn, she pricked the skin by hand, pressing the ink into place. The process was painful, but it was also social: other women might gather, singing, telling stories, and offering advice to the girl or young woman receiving her marks. It was common for tattoos to be applied at transitional moments—puberty, marriage, or the birth of a first child—transforming the pain of tattooing into a rite of endurance and belonging. The permanence of the marks was part of their power: unlike jewelry, they could not be stolen, and unlike charms, they could not be lost. They remained forever, silent witnesses to a woman’s life.

For centuries, deq and xal flourished in Kurdish villages. But in the twentieth century the practice began to decline. Urbanization drew younger generations away from rural lifeways; new religious interpretations discouraged permanent body markings; and many women feared that the tattoos, once a source of pride, would expose them to stigma in modern towns. Today, it is often only the grandmothers who still bear them, their faces inscribed with fading blue signs that speak of another era. And yet, even as the practice itself diminishes, interest in it has grown. Young Kurds, both in Kurdistan and the diaspora, have begun to document their elders’ tattoos, photographing them and recording their meanings before they vanish. Artists adapt the motifs into embroidery, textiles, and jewelry. Some younger women and men even choose to receive small tattoos inspired by deq, not as fashion accessories but as tributes to their heritage, as acts of remembrance that tie them to the mountains and valleys their ancestors called home.

Explore Turkish Mesopotamia with ORIENTO Travel's tour, where you will have chance to meet women with deqs on their faces

To encounter a woman with deq as a traveler is to brush against this deep history. The marks you see are not merely designs, but fragments of a cosmology, tribal codes, and personal narratives layered into the skin. A rosette on a hand may echo the ancient Yezidi sun; a ladder-like set of lines may speak of fertility or a clan’s heritage; a lone dot at the corner of the mouth may be nothing less than a grandmother’s blessing. Each tattoo is a story condensed to a symbol, a story that may or may not be shared depending on the woman’s willingness. Respectful curiosity can lead to profound encounters: asking gently, listening more than speaking, and always seeking consent before a photograph. These conversations often unfold into memories of youth, of marriages arranged long ago, of migrations and hardships, of the resilience that comes from carrying tradition on the body itself.

Seen this way, deq and xal are not relics of a “primitive” past, as they were sometimes dismissed, but rather a form of sophisticated cultural expression. They are a dialogue between body and universe, between tribe and individual, between past and present. They reveal how Kurdish women, often excluded from written history, inscribed their own records, their own cosmologies, onto themselves. And they remind us that tradition is never static—it ebbs, fades, revives, and transforms, much like the blue ink that blurs and softens as the years pass, but never entirely disappears.

For the traveler, to see these tattoos is to glimpse the endurance of a culture that has weathered conquests, displacements, and modernity itself. They are the whispers of ancient Yezidi sun worship, the codes of Kurdish tribes, the protective prayers of mothers, and the beauty marks of young women, all condensed into dots and lines. They are the universe, shrunk to the scale of skin, carried quietly for a lifetime.