Four hands

A hand can put pigment under skin in four ways, and the traditions that use each one know the difference even where English does not.

Counted from the method field on every tradition record.

Cut

The skin is cut or chiselled and pigment is rubbed into the cut, so the mark has a texture as well as a colour.

Māori tā moko is the clearest case: the uhi, a hafted chisel of albatross bone, is struck with a mallet and the skin keeps a groove. A moko made this way catches light. A moko made with a needle does not, which is exactly what changed when steel arrived — and why some practitioners have taken the chisel up again.

The Ainu word anchi-piri names obsidian and a cut. Among the Lumad and Negrito peoples of the Philippines a hafted chisel incises the skin in short dashes, and the result is partly scarification.

Poke

A point held in the hand and pushed into the skin, once per mark, with the pigment carried on or into the hole.

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.

Stitch

A needle carrying a thread blackened with soot, drawn through the skin so the line of pigment stays where the thread passed.

Skin stitching is the Arctic method, and it belongs to the same set of hands and the same needle case as the sewing that made the clothing people survived in. Nothing is punctured repeatedly; the line goes in once.

It is the rarest method on this site — two traditions out of the whole map — and the one that most clearly cannot be done by machine.

Tap

A needle or a comb of needles fixed at a right angle to a handle, and a second piece of wood striking the handle to drive it in.

This is the Austronesian method, and it runs from Taiwan through the Philippines and Borneo across the whole Pacific: Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, the Marquesas, Hawaii. The rate is about 90 to 120 taps a minute, which is a drum tempo, and the sound is what a tattooing session sounds like in half the traditions on this site.

Inference — the hand that holds the comb does not push. It positions and holds the angle; the striking hand supplies the force. That division of labour is what lets a wide comb lay down a band of solid black at a speed no single point can match, and it is why the Pacific traditions cover so much more skin than the poking ones.

And the one that renamed them

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.

Machine