Some of the world’s most popular tattoo motifs trace back to early 19th-century Edo (modern Tokyo), where tattoo artists took inspiration from color woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e. Many of the early tattoo artists were trained as blockcutters, craftsmen who transformed designs drawn on paper into carved wooden blocks for mass-producing prints. In the late 1820s, the artist Kuniyoshi designed a series of prints showing Chinese martial arts heroes with spectacular tattoos that were—and still are—often copied by real-life tattoo artists.