instrumentKhem sak
เข็มสัก · khem sak
The tattooing needle: a long shaft, a fine point, two hands
User:Phydoughx · Public domain| Made of | steel, brass, bamboo |
|---|---|
| Points | a single fine point, or a small cluster |
| Held | one hand drives, the other guides the shaft and stretches the skin |
| Length | long enough to be steadied against the off hand |
What it is
The sak yant needle: a long steel or brass shaft, pushed with one hand and steered with the other.
The long version
The grip is the same one Shway Yoe drew in Burma and the same one a visitor photographs in Chiang Mai today — the driving hand, the guiding fork of finger and thumb, the skin pulled tight by an assistant or by the bearer's own posture. A single design takes a sitting.
The modern working needle is steel, single-use, and that is the part of the practice that has changed most in fifty years.
Connected to
Named here by
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Yantra tattooing — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- Yantra tattooing — Wikipedia (en)
- Sak Yant Chiang Mai — the masters' profiles — sakyantchiangmai.com
- The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive
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