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Hand Poke EN ไทย

designThe framed animal

Where it goesthighs, legs

What it is

A tiger, a cat, a monkey, an elephant, a nat or a bilu, each sitting inside an oval frame of letters.

The long version

Shway Yoe: each representation is surrounded by a roughly oval tracery of letters, which forms a curious and remarkably effective frame, so each animal has a setting of its own — and vacant spaces are filled the same way, the top and bottom finished with a scalloped line.

Sometimes the letters are said to carry a cabalistic meaning; ordinarily, he says, no more is claimed for them than beauty. The serious charms go elsewhere on the body, usually in vermilion.

Inference — the frame is what makes the leg read as cloth. A repeating field of bounded units is a textile pattern; a scene is a picture. These traditions chose the textile.

Connected to

Where each claim comes from
FieldTierSourceNote
defaultcitedThe Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive
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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