traditionIban tattooing
pantang · Iban
A journey mark, a headhunter's hands, an aubergine flower on each shoulder
| Where it goes | hands, fingers, arms, chest, back, legs |
|---|---|
| Notes | Hand tattoos say what the man did; the shoulder flower says he left home. |
| Ink | Soot and water |
about 1,850 – 2,026 · Described by Hose and McDougall in 1912; carried by the last headhunters into the 2000s
2.3000, 112.0000 · OpenStreetMap
What it is
Borneo: tapped designs carved on a block and printed onto the skin, with hand marks reserved for a man who had taken a head.
The long version
The Iban mark a journey. Bungai terung, the aubergine flower, goes on each shoulder when a young man leaves on bejalai — the walkabout that makes him an adult. The entegulun, the hand tattoo, is not a decoration: it records that the wearer took a head. Anthony Bourdain filmed one of the last men entitled to it.
The design source is the striking part. Borneo tattooists carved patterns onto wooden blocks, inked the block, printed it onto the skin, and then tapped along the printed line — a stamp, a stencil and a tool in one, and a way of keeping a repertoire that does not depend on memory.
Notes
Hose and McDougall, 1912, are the fullest colonial description and carry the usual freight; the Iban record their own designs now.
Connected to
- Tap The method.
- Kayan tattooing Upriver, and mostly women's work.
Named here by
- The pilgrim's cross The same solution to the same problem: carve the design into wood.
- Kayan tattooing Downriver, and mostly men's.
- Konyak marks And the hands.
- The design block The block.
- The aubergine flower The tradition it belongs to.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Iban people — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- Iban people — Wikipedia (en)
- The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, Vol. II — 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