instrumentThe design block
pantang · Iban
A repertoire kept outside a head
| Made of | wood, paper |
|---|---|
| Points | none — it carries the design, not the point |
What it is
Not a needle: a carved wooden block, inked and printed onto the skin, so the tattooist follows a line instead of remembering one.
The long version
Three traditions on this site solved the same problem the same way and had no contact with each other. Borneo tattooists carved designs into wooden blocks, printed them onto the skin and tapped along the print. The Razzouk family in Jerusalem still holds olive-wood blocks three hundred years old and still prints pilgrims' crosses from them. And Shway Yoe reports that a good Burmese saya carried a sample book of drawings so the boy could choose his figures and their positions before the opium went in.
Inference — a flash sheet, a stencil and a catalogue are all the same invention, and it arrives wherever a hand tradition has more designs than one person can hold.
Connected to
- Iban tattooing The block.
- The pilgrim's cross The block, still in use.
- Htoe kwin The sample book, 1882.
Named here by
- The sample book The same invention, three times over.
- The stencil book The same idea.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive | |
| text.story | cited | The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive
- Razzouk Tattoo — Wikipedia (en)
- Iban 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