deq
From Syriac *dyoqo*, puncturing. A male tattooist is *deqqak*, a female one *deqqake*.
The words
The word each tradition uses, and what it means before it means tattoo. Most of them mean prick, strike or write.
{'name': 'To prick', 'th': 'แทง'}
godna
To prick. The noun for the tattoo and the verb for the needle are the same word.
hajichi
Needle-strike. Written with the characters for needle and thrust.
htoe kwin
*Htoe* is to prick or pierce; *kwin* is a ring or an enclosure. The name describes the framed rings the figures sit in.
kakiniq
From the Proto-Inuit-Yupik root *kaki-, to pierce or prick — the same root across Iñupiaq, Inuktitut, West Greenlandic and Tunumiit.
sak
สัก
To prick. The Khmer root *cɔkʔ* means the same, and the Khmer dictionary keeps it native rather than borrowed.
sicanje
Pricking. Colloquially also *bocanje* and *bockanje*, which mean the same and sound like it.
{'name': 'To strike', 'th': 'ตอก'}
tatau
The Polynesian word English borrowed. Cook's crew wrote it down in 1769 and it displaced every English word for the practice.
{'name': 'To write', 'th': 'เขียน'}
ptasan
Related to the Atayal word for writing and marking — the face as a written surface.
tua mueang
ᨲᩫ᩠ᩅᨾᩮᩬᩨᨦ
The northern letters — Tai Tham script, the script of the region's manuscripts and of the yant that go on northern skin. Khom is the central…
{'name': 'Pattern', 'th': 'ลาย'}
batok
From Proto-Austronesian *beCik, tattoo, with relatives *patik, mottled, and *burik, speckled — the word for a pattern, applied to skin, cloth and pot…
ming
The Chin word for the facial marks. Banned by name in the 1960s.
moko
*Tā* is to strike; *moko* is the design itself. The verb in the name is the mallet, not the point.
sak kha lai
สักขาลาย
To prick the legs in patterns — the verb, the body part and the word for pattern, in that order. No separate noun for the tattoo is needed.
{'name': 'Other', 'th': 'อื่นๆ'}
anchi-piri
Obsidian and a cut: the word carries the tool and the wound, and no word for ink.
irezumi
Inserting ink. The word names the material and the direction of travel, and nothing about the hand.
lao phung dam
ลาวพุงดำ
"Black-bellied Lao" — a central Thai name for the tattooed northerner, applied from outside and carrying a view with it.
veiqia
The practice and the marks, in one word — and a tattooist is a *dauveiqia*, one who does veiqia.