Decked out in deq: traditional Kurdish tattoos enjoy a revival across the diaspora
Ten years ago, artist Elu threw herself into saving an ancient, female marking technique. Now everyone wants one
In May 2023, Elu, a well-known tattoo artist, was in Berlin attending a fundraiser for the earthquake that struck Syria and Turkey earlier that year when she looked around and noticed something that gave her a rush of happiness. The 31-year-old counted 15 people in the room whom she had adorned with Kurdish deq markings – small symbols drawn in fine lines, often on the face and hands. When she first heard about deq 10 years previously, the technique had been on the brink of dying out. Elu had made it her goal to learn and preserve the craft and it seemed to be working.
“It was a real gift to see so many people from our diaspora connected like that and to have helped facilitate it,” Elu recalled.
Deq tattoos are believed to have been handpoked across Kurdistan since pre-Islamic times. They were primarily created and worn by women for good luck and protection, fertility, or simply for beautification. The ink is made from one dry and one wet ingredient, such as charcoal and milk — with breastmilk from the mother of a baby girl thought to bring particular good luck.
Throughout the 20th century, Elu says the practice became less popular for various reasons: the stigmatisation of the Kurdish minority in Turkey, a growing migrant diaspora’s desire to assimilate in new cultures, the growing influence of strains of Islam that view tattooing as haram. In Kurdish communities across south-west Asia and north Africa, it is mostly elderly women who still have them.
Now based in Lisbon, Portugal, Elu, who goes only by her first name, grew up in western Germany in a Kurdish Alevi family from eastern Turkey. “I grew up with a very strong Kurdish identity,” Elu said. Listening to traditional music, sharing food together and living in a connected community shaped her early years. However, she was never taught the Zazacki dialect of her family, in part because her parents feared that the language would mark her out for anti-Kurdish racism, which is common in Germany.
“If I could speak it, I think I would have a different access to my culture because so much is transmitted orally,” she said, including the art of deq.
Elu first became interested in tattoo art as a child, admiring her older cousins who had the names of their parents etched on their skin or symbols related to Alevism. When she turned 18 she bought a tattoo gun and began creating her own ornamental designs and repeat patterns. Aged 20, she travelled to Thailand where she saw people practicing traditional stick and poke tattoos and decided to stay and learn the skill.
While there, out of curiosity, she googled “traditional Kurdish tattoos” and came across pictures of deq markings, which looked remarkably like the line-based patterns she was already creating. “I froze for a minute, because I realised I’d been doing this without even knowing it,” she said.
Elu called her mum to ask if anyone in their family had these tattoos and was told that Elu’s great-grandmother had some on her face that she had done herself. “When people ask me how I discovered deq, I always tell them, I feel like deq came through me,” Elu said. “It felt almost like a reincarnation.”
Despite her enthusiasm, learning more about the craft proved a challenge: “Everything I found online said it was vanishing, it’s gone, it’s disappeared.” So she spent many months and years reading as much as possible, translating from multiple languages and began making trips back to Kurdish regions to learn directly from community elders. Three years ago, she made her longest trip, travelling to the Dersim region in eastern Turkey with gender rights activist Çiler Kiliç to film a documentary about deq.
“Some people had dots on their foreheads that were tattooed as protection charms when they were babies and some had been tattooed when they got married,” she said. Other women had etched them simply for decoration. “I asked one woman why she did it and she just pointed to my nose piercings and asked: ‘Why did you do that?’ It was a really humbling moment because I realised, yeah, why am I questioning her beauty choices?”
Elu now runs a tattoo studio in Lisbon and travels around Europe offering guest sessions at other studios. She tries to make the process as close as possible to how deq would have traditionally been created. Although she may discuss symbols and their meanings in advance, she won’t create an agreed-upon design beforehand. Instead, she prefers to work intuitively and spontaneously on her client’s bodies as they talk through their ideas and what they want to express.
“Some people have stories of family members who removed their deq out of shame when they came to Europe, using lasers or even acid and lemons,” she said. “So creating these tattoos together is a process of reclaiming our identity.”
In adherence with hygiene regulations, Elu doesn’t mix her own ink and instead purchases one made from wood ashes and ethanol. Occasionally she will add a few drops of breast milk if her client strongly desires it and they can bring it from someone they know and trust.
Elu is now aware of a handful of other artists also working to revive deq in Europe and Turkey and recently trained the first deq artist in Switzerland. “It’s skipped two generations, so it’s the great-grandchildren of the last people who did it who are now reclaiming it,” Elu said.
As its popularity grows among the diaspora Kurdish community, Elu’s one reservation is that she hopes it won’t become an appropriated fashion trend, as has happened with other traditional designs such as Amazigh tattoos from north Africa. “I don’t share the symbols and their meanings online, as I don’t want anyone to copy and profit from them,” she said. “I want people to understand the depth this carries for us and that it is part of our cultural heritage that needs to be protected.”
