With the development of image editing software techniques, the content integrity and authenticity of original digital images become more and more important in digital content security. A novel image tampering detection and recovery algorithm based on digital watermarking technology and a chaotic system is proposed, and it can effectively locate the tampering region and achieve the approximate recovery of the original image by using the hidden information. The pseudo-random cyclic chain is realized by the chaotic system to construct the mapping relationship between the image subblocks. It can effectively guarantee the randomness of the positional relationship between the hidden information and the original image block for the better ergodicity of the pseudo-random chain. The recovery value optimization algorithm can represent image information better. In addition to the traditional Level-1 recovery, a weight adaptive algorithm is designed to distinguish the original block from the primary recovery block, allowing $3\times 3$ neighbor block recovery to achieve better results. The experimental results show that the hierarchical tamper detection algorithm makes tamper detection have higher precision. When facing collage attacks and large general tampering, it will have higher recovery image quality and better resistance performance.