inkLampblack
เขม่าตะเกียง
Soot off a burning oil lamp, the best from sesame oil
What it is
Soot collected from a lamp, mixed with water as it is needed. Under the skin it reads blue-black, and it does not leave.
The long version
Shway Yoe names the grade: the best lampblack is the soot of burning sesame oil. The Burmese black recipe recorded on the Myanmar article is more elaborate — soot mixed with dried gallbladder of fish or cattle, powdered, boiled, simmered with bitter melon leaves and dried to a paste until wanted.
The two colours behaved differently and everyone noticed. Milne, on the Shan: tattooing in red sometimes fades, the blue appears to be indelible. Shway Yoe, on the Burmese: the blue dye from the lampblack never disappears, the vermilion gradually fades away.
Inference — that difference decided what each colour was used for. Identity, manhood and the leg work went in black, for life. Charms went in red, and a charm that fades is a charm that can be renewed — which is a feature, not a fault.
Connected to
Named here by
- Soot and water The refined version.
- Vermilion The colour that stays.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive
- Tattooing in Myanmar — Wikipedia (en)
- Shans at Home — scanned by the Internet Archive
- Soot — 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