Tattoos from the Pazyryk chief of burial mound 2 circa 300 BCE. He died violently, killed with a Scythian-type battle axe and scalped. He was carefully embalmed, his body covered in animal style tattoos. His preserved head can be found at the Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg [2618×1920]

The chief was elaborately decorated with an interlocking series of striking designs representing a variety of fantastic beasts. The best preserved tattoos were images of a donkey, a mountain ram, two highly stylized deer with long antlers and an imaginary carnivore on the right arm. Two monsters resembling griffins decorate the chest, and on the left arm are three partially obliterated images which seem to represent two deer and a mountain goat. On the front of the right leg a fish extends from the foot to the knee. A monster crawls over the right foot, and on the inside of the shin is a series of four running rams which touch each other to form a single design. The left leg also bears tattoos, but these designs could not be clearly distinguished. In addition, the chief’s back is tattooed with a series of small circles in line with the vertebral column [Wikipedia link of the Pazyryk burials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazyryk_burials)

Tattoos from the chief’s right arm are depicted in the post. There’s a very interesting 185 page PDF linked to citation 40 of the Wikipedia link titled Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia, cataloging a 2017 collaborative exhibition between the British and Hermitage Museums

Scalped? Was this practice usual?