methodPoke
แทง
One point, pushed in by the hand that holds it
What it is
A point held in the hand and pushed into the skin, once per mark, with the pigment carried on or into the hole.
The long version
The hand does the work: it provides the force, the depth and the rhythm. A poked line is a row of punctures close enough to read as continuous — Shway Yoe's description of the Burmese method is exactly that, "a series of punctures close together, forming what afterwards fades into a rough line."
The tool can be a thorn, a fish bone, a sewing needle, a sharpened bamboo splint or a two-foot weighted brass rod. What makes it poking is that nothing strikes the tool and nothing drives it but the hand.
How
Depth is the whole skill. Too shallow and the mark leaves with the skin; too deep and the pigment spreads under it and the line thickens with age.
Connected to
- Tap The one it gets confused with, and the one that does the striking for you.
- What counts as hand-poked Where the line between them stops being clear.
Named here by
- Machine What it replaced, and what it named.
- Tap The sibling method, and the one this site is named for.
- What counts as hand-poked One.
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
- Stick and poke — 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