methodMachine
เครื่องสัก
1891, and the reason every other method on this page needs a name
1,891 – 2,026 · Samuel O'Reilly's patent, and everything after it
What it is
An electric motor drives the needle, at speeds between fifty and three thousand insertions a minute. It is here for contrast.
The long version
Until 1891 there was no need for the phrase hand-poked. Every tattoo in every tradition on this site was made by hand, and the differences that mattered were between a comb and a point, a chisel and a needle.
Inference — the machine did not only speed the work up; it renamed everything else. "Traditional", "hand", "by hand" are all retroactive labels, applied after a machine existed to distinguish them from. That is worth holding on to when a tradition is described as having "resisted" the machine: most of them had no opinion about a device that did not exist when the practice was formed.
Connected to
- Poke What it replaced, and what it named.
Named here by
- Stick and poke What it is defined against.
- Five thousand years The newest thing that changed everything.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Tattoo machine — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- Tattoo machine — Wikipedia (en)
- Samuel O'Reilly — 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