Tattoos were worn by many Amerindian peoples as a matter of personal taste and are done according to personal fancy, sometimes to fulfill a dream someone has had. In different places, if one were to go ever further west and south and visit Amerindian nations, hairstyles, face-painting, body-adorning and tattooing could be found to be quite elaborate, even eccentric. Women tended to wear the tattoos as embellishment, and men often to point out their many adventures. There were several methods of tattooing. They would first draw the figure to be tattooed. Then sharp evergreen needles were soaked in the colour and mixed with charcoal of crushed alder, which had been softened in water or grease. Then the skin was punctured with the needles. The colour was left under the skin after the puncture had healed.

Another method involved drawing the figures on the skins with charcoal crushed and diluted with water. By pricking the skin with the sharp tips of bones, blood was mixed with the black paste and traces of it were left in the wounds, which became permanent. Tattoos could also be made by pricking the design into the skin with fish bones or needles and then adding crushed charcoal, sometimes with colour mixed in, to the skin and rubbing it in.

Tattooed images often revealed the bond of the Amerindians with nature, for the most frequent designs featured the snake, the turtle, the lizards, the squirrel, the flowers, the sun or the moon. They appeared especially on the face and were placed on the body with no order or symmetry, but according to the imagination of the individual.