riteWhen it is done
Before ordination, at twelve, at puberty, when the weaving is mastered
What it is
The date is rarely free. Most traditions on this site fix the work to a passage the person is making anyway.
The long version
Bamar: the waist tattoo is done before or soon after temporary ordination as a monk — two rites of passage stacked on one season. Shan: twelve for the bold, fourteen for most. Chin: fifteen to twenty. Ainu: from five to thirteen, widened until marriage. Kalinga and Cordilleran: after the act that earns it. Atayal: a man's chin after he fathers a child.
Inference — a mark made at a moment is a dated document. It is how these traditions record a life without writing anything down.
Connected to
- Htoe kwin Stacked with ordination.
- Atayal ptasan Stacked with fatherhood and with the loom.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Tattooing in Myanmar — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- Tattooing in Myanmar — Wikipedia (en)
- Shans at Home — scanned by the Internet Archive
- Ainu people — Wikipedia (en)
- Atayal people — 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