episodeThe tattoo is clothing

Three languages, three centuries, three continents, one metaphor

What it is

Sources in Burmese, Northern Thai, Spanish and Samoan — and a Cordilleran rule recorded in English — reach for the same comparison: the tattoo is not on the body, it is what the body wears.

The long version

Shway Yoe, Burma, 1882, on the finished htoe kwin: the effect is "not so much of a marking of the cuticle as of a skin-tight pair of caleçons, fitting better than the best glove ever made."

A Lanna volume, northern Thailand, describing the same region's work from its own side: men tattooed their bodies จนดูเหมือนนุ่งกางเกงสีดำ — "until it looked as if they wore black trousers" — and a man with no marks should put on a woman's skirt instead.

A Spanish account of the Visayans: a naked tattooed man "appears to be dressed in a kind of handsome armor engraved with very fine work… their dress at home and in their barrio is their tattoos and a bahag."

The Cordillerans: having no tattoos was equated to being naked. The Samoans: an untattooed man is telefua or telenoa — naked, in the ordinary word, not as a figure of speech.

Inference — this is the one comparison that survives translation everywhere on this map, and it is doing work. A garment is the thing that makes a person presentable in public; it is put on at a particular age; its absence is shameful rather than merely unusual; and it is the first thing another person reads. Every one of those is also true of the marks. Where a tradition covers a whole zone of the body, its own sources describe that zone as dressed.

Notes

The count of traditions on this site whose sources use the clothing comparison is computed at build time and printed on the page rather than asserted here.

Connected to

• Htoe kwin Caleçons.
• Sak kha lai Black trousers.
• Batok Handsome armor.
• Tatau Naked, in the ordinary word.
• Where the marks go Which is why the body map is the argument, not the decoration.

Named here by

• Batok "Dressed in a kind of handsome armor" — the third of the three.
• Htoe kwin "A skin-tight pair of caleçons" — one of the three.
• Sak kha lai One of the three traditions whose own sources call the tattoo clothing.
• Tatau An untattooed man is called naked. In the language, not in a metaphor.
• Where the marks go The other half of the same argument.
• The painted ones "Dressed in a kind of handsome armor."

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