In the past century, excavations of the Pazyryk culture kurgans in the Altai Mountains revealed one of the most remarkable discoveries in archaeology: exceptionally well-preserved mummies with complex zoomorphic tattoo motifs. These findings provided a unique window into ritual practices, identity construction, and cultural networks of the Iron Age steppe. My doctoral project examines body modification among steppe nomads from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining archaeology, anthropology, and iconographic studies. Through an operational chain analysis of tattooing and comparison with tattoo traditions in North America, this research seeks to understand the technical and symbolic processes that gave meaning to these bodily marks. This work offers a renewed synthesis of the role of tattooing in the past, exploring its value as a social, ritual, and cosmological marker within the broader framework of Eurasian protohistory.