All this new surge in tattooing. I thought I'd look online to see what tattoos are really about, thinking about whether this sudden boom in tattooing is going towards the notorious 666 foretold in Revelation. Very interesting what I start to find out looking superficially online. Tattoos were very much the rage in the Roman Empire before the rise of Christianity. The main use was to brand a gladiator or a slave. If gladiators were killed, their tattoos would help in dealing with the bodies. With slaves there were various words used in tattoos on their hands, such as a word to say the tax had been paid on them or a word to say they had escaped (no idea how you tattoo an escaped slave unless you capture them first of course). The words tattooed on escaped slaves, I suppose after they were captured again, were the first three letters of a word, such as FUG for the Latin for fugitive. A slave who stole or escaped (escaping is really stealing yourself from your owner) might get the letters FUR (for Latin fure, meaning thief). Moving to recent history, concentration camps used them to ensure bodies could be identified, even after burning. So maybe in warfare times, like today, tattoos on soldiers, like with gladiators in Roman times, would help count bodies on each side of the battle. A general or commander could have all their own troops tattooed so they can see how many of the bodies lost in a battle were their own soldiers, so they can do their counting and accounting. This seems to be the 666 tattoo purpose. Actually 666 is three letters, because Greek used in the writing of Revelation used letters for numbering. Now normally a tattoo in those times was the first part of a word, including a vowel. 666 is actually ChXS but there is one ancient copy of Revelation which instead has what looks like ChIS. So I did some digging to see what old European words perhaps used in Roman times started with Chis. The first one I came across rings true. Chislo or cislo means in slavic languages numdering, accounting, counting, calculating. This fits with Revelation saying "if anyone has a mind of wisdom let him calculate the number of the beast ... 666 (ChXS or ChIS) for it is (a) man's number". So maybe the tattoo of each person with something like ChIS will be for numbering dead bodies to identify which ones belong to the Beast empire system.
