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Hand Poke EN ไทย

questionWhat counts as hand-poked

Tapping is not poking, and both are hands

What it is

The site is called hand poke and half the traditions on it do not poke. Here is the line it draws and why the line is arguable.

The long version

A poked tattoo is driven by the hand holding the tool. A tapped one is driven by a second stick striking a hafted comb. A stitched one is sewn. A cut one is chiselled or incised and then rubbed with pigment.

All four are hand methods and none of them is a machine, which is why they are all here. But calling them all "hand-poke" flattens the thing each tradition is proudest of, so this site keeps them as four and says which is which on every record.

The hard cases are real. Māori uhi work was replaced by needle work in the nineteenth century and the tradition kept its name. Modern professional hand-poke uses a cartridge needle in a stabiliser pen, which is a tool with a handle and a grip and no motor. A reader who would draw the line somewhere else is looking at the same field on the same records and can re-sort it.

Connected to

Named here by

Where each claim comes from
FieldTierSourceNote
defaultinference
text_thinferencewritten in Thai by this project, not machine-translated

Sources

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

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