depictionThe murals
จิตรกรรมฝาผนัง
What a painting of a tattoo is evidence of
Ellnik · CC BY-SA 3.0about 1,800 – 1,900 · Nineteenth-century Lanna temple painting
What it is
Northern temple walls carry men with marked legs and torsos, painted by people who saw them daily.
The long version
The Lanna volume rests its case on exactly this: the evidence for the custom is the murals in important temples, which show men tattooed until they look dressed.
Inference — a mural is good evidence for three things — that the custom existed, roughly what area of the body it covered, and that it was ordinary enough to paint without comment. It is weak evidence for the designs themselves: painters simplify, and a wall painted with a hundred figures is not a pattern book. This site reads the murals for extent and does not read them for detail.
Connected to
- Wat Phumin The best-known wall.
- Sak kha lai What it shows.
Named here by
- Wat Phumin What a painting is evidence of.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | อภิมหามนต์คาถา (Supreme Maha Mantra Katha), pp. 19–21 — held and digitised in the wichaa.net manuscript corpus, item 6968 | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- อภิมหามนต์คาถา (Supreme Maha Mantra Katha), pp. 19–21 — held and digitised in the wichaa.net manuscript corpus, item 6968
- จิตรกรรมฝาผนัง — Wikipedia (th)
- Wat Phumin — Wikipedia (en)
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there