This paper is devoted to tangent martingales in Banach spaces. We provide the definition of tangency through local characteristics, basic $L^p$- and $φ$-estimates, a precise construction of a decoupled tangent martingale, new estimates for vector-valued stochastic integrals, and several other claims concerning tangent martingales and local characteristics in infinite dimensions. This work extends various real-valued and vector-valued results in this direction e.g. due to Grigelionis, Hitczenko, Jacod, Kallenberg, Kwapień, McConnell, and Woyczyński. The vast majority of the assertions presented in the paper is done under the sufficient and necessary UMD assumption on the corresponding Banach space.