Kakiniit

Kakiniit are the traditional tattoos of the Inuit, carried across the Arctic from Alaska through Canada to Greenland. The practice was done almost entirely among women, women tattooing other women, with facial tattoos known separately as tunniit that marked a girl's passage into womanhood. The marks were applied by skin stitching, sewing a sinew thread blackened with soot through the skin, or by hand poking, and they carried meanings tied to identity, family, skill, medicine, and Inuit belief. In one telling, tattoos on the hands and arms recall the sea goddess Sedna, whose severed fingers became the sea animals, and a woman's markings helped guarantee her passage to a good place in the afterlife.

Christian missionaries suppressed the practice through the 20th century, and in Greenland it fell out of living memory entirely. It has been revived in recent years by practitioners such as Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, who founded Inuit Tattoo Traditions in 2014 and helped seed revitalization work across Alaska and Canada, alongside Angela Hovak Johnston's Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project. The markings are meant only for Inuit to wear.