Late last year, scientists verified the age of the world’s oldest tattoos. According to The Smithsonian, they belong to a European Tyrolean Iceman who died and was buried beneath a glacier positioned near the Austrian–Italian border around 3250 B.C. He had a whopping 61 tattoos on his body.

We know that people have been decorating their bodies with ink for centuries. Yet, looking at the famous paintings that serve as a visual record of our history pre-photography, you’d think tattoos were basically nonexistent. In the 17th and 18th centuries, they were far from ubiquitous, but it’s a shame artists didn’t seek out more tattooed models for their work.

Enter Nicolas Amiard, a contemporary Photoshop master who’s behind “The Art of Tattoo,” where modern inked designs meet classic paintings.

“I’m French,” Amiard said, introducing himself to The Huffington Post over email. “I live in Paris where I’m the art director at an advertising agency. As AD, I use Photoshop all day long. That’s how I technically realized these images.”

He explained that his “Art of Tattoo” series consists of full photo-manipulations.
He had the idea to mix modern tattoos with classical paintings because, in his words, “I like tattoos” and mixing opposed things. He added that, after viewing a collection of paintings, he caught wind of a big tattoo event in Paris in March.

“That’s why I thought it was time to [create] this series,” he concluded.

Nicolas Amiard

Amiard’s project reminds us of another aspect of famous paintings past: it’s safe to say, art history has a whitewashing problem.

As several blogs and news outlets have pointed out over the years, the famous paintings that make it to the walls of well-known museums are disproportionately filled with the faces of white men and women, downplaying the existence of darker-skinned people throughout pre-Enlightenment Europe and Asia.

Amiard isn’t directly tackling this issue. But his series takes the sometimes homogenous bodies of 17th and 18th-century paintings and adds a twist. We’d love to see what his series would like if he took into consideration the paintings we don’t often see at the Met or the Louvre.