Ancient Marks

National Geographic photographer Chris Rainier spent seven years traveling across six continents and much of the Pacific Ocean documenting what it means to mark the body in ritual and initiation. Rainier and filmmaker Ethan Boehme team up to bring Rainier's beautiful photographs of exquisite tattoos and sacred scarring rituals around the world poetically to film. With music by Anoushka Shankar.

The human form, whether isolated in the forests of the Amazon, swept clean by the bitter winds of the Arctic, or soothed by sunset rains of Polynesia became through the brilliance of inspired artistry a map of culture and myth, a sacred geography of the soul, all expressed by the simplicity of forms painted, carved, incised, or etched upon the canvas of the body.