Hand Poke

The Philippine traditions, tapped with a hafted thorn at ninety to a hundred and twenty strikes a minute.

Every up-country Burmese man wore one: a sheet of dark-blue animals from the navel to below the knee, begun in boyhood.

Japan: needles bound with silk to a wooden rod, worked by hand — *tebori*, carving by hand — over years, in a design that covers the body like a…

Inuit tattoos: women's work on women's skin, stitched with a sooted thread drawn under the skin, or poked.

สักขาลาย

The Lanna leg tattoo: waist to knee, sometimes to the ankle, dense enough that the murals paint it as a pair of black trousers.

สักยันต์

Letters, numbers and figures arranged into a diagram — *yant* — and pricked into skin with a long needle.

The one everybody has seen: a needle, ink, no machine — punk kitchens, prisons, and now studios that do nothing else.

New Zealand: albatross-bone chisels struck with a mallet, cutting a groove that stays visible as texture, not only as colour.

Samoa: a comb of bone and turtle shell, struck with a mallet, covering a man from the middle of the back to the knees.

Poke

แทง

A point held in the hand and pushed into the skin, once per mark, with the pigment carried on or into the hole.

Tap

ตอก

A needle or a comb of needles fixed at a right angle to a handle, and a second piece of wood striking the handle to drive it in.

Hnitkwasok

A brass rod about two feet long, weighted at the top with a cast figure, with a split four-way point at the other end.

The traditions 28

Named traditions of marking skin by hand — who is marked, who does the marking, where on the body, and whether anyone is still doing it.

The methods 5

Four ways a hand puts pigment under skin: push a point in, strike a comb, draw a threaded needle through, cut and rub.

The instruments 9

Brass rods, bamboo splints, boar tusk combs, thorn bundles and bone needles — what they are made of and how long they are.

The inks 9

Soot, charcoal, indigo, gall and cinnabar — and what they were mixed with before they went in.

The designs 10

What the marks are of, what they are said to do, and which ones have to be earned.

The rites 5

The fee, the day, the vows, the food not eaten and the words said over the needle.

The people 9

Practitioners, and the outsiders who wrote the tradition down — which is not the same list.

The places 6

Villages, temples, quarters and museums where the work is done or the record is kept.

The words 18

The word each tradition uses, and what it means before it means tattoo. Most of them mean prick, strike or write.

The episodes 13

A ban, an expedition, a photograph, a revival — dated, and with the paper that did it where there is one.

The evidence 7

Tattooed skin that survived — bog, ice, desert and salt — with the date the laboratory gave it.

The depictions 3

Murals, plates, figurines and photographs — what a picture of a tattoo is evidence of, and what it is not.

The keepers 3

Museums, archives, collectives and the studios that teach the hand method now.

The open questions 5

Questions this site cannot settle: whose designs, whose hands, whose photographs, and what counts as hand-poked at all.