Who doesn’t love a piping hot stack of pancakes smothered in butter and maple syrup? Long before becoming a the diner mainstay that they are today, pancakes were a staple of people’s diets for over a thousand years. 

Historians believe that the ancient Greeks first came up with pancakes around the 5th century B.C. The earlier precursor to the breakfast we love today was usually prepared with wheat flour, olive oil, honey and curdled milk. 

One of the unique things about pancakes is that you can find some variation of them in almost every culture. From the enormous (but thin) dosas of India to the spongey canjeeros of Somalia to the lingonberry smothered thin pancakes of Scandinavia, there are hundreds of different varieties of pancake. Pancakes can be thick or thin, wide or small, covered with accoutrement or served on their own. 

Excluding potato pancakes, which I feel should be in a separate category all together, my personal favorite pancake is the cornmeal derived Johnnycake. They aren’t as sweet as a standard buttermilk pancake and you normally don’t cover them in syrup. At least I don’t. If you’ve never indulged in them, I do recommend you do so post haste. 

I’m getting hungry as I type this, which leads me to this odd rumination—why would a person get a food tattoo? Wouldn’t it consistently taunt you and make you hungry? It seems like a dangerous trigger to leave laying around on your body. I, for one, couldn’t look at a pancake tattoo for the rest of my life without instantly craving pancakes every time I see it. Seriously. 

The people in the gallery below must have a lot more willpower than I do. Or maybe they just spend their entire lives procuring and dining upon pancakes. Who knows? Enjoy these pancake tattoos and try not to get too hungry.