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Hand Poke EN ไทย

traditionKayan tattooing

tedak · Kayan

Women's forearms and thighs, worked over years

TappedMethod
ThinningStill done?
womenWhose skin
womenWho marks it
Where it goesarms, hands, thighs, feet
NotesTattooed by women, for women, over several years and several sittings.
InkSoot and water

about 1,850 – 2,000 · Hose and McDougall describe the full sequence in 1912

2.8000, 114.0000 · OpenStreetMap

What it is

Upriver Borneo, where the tattooists were women and the work went on a woman's forearms, thighs and feet across years.

The long version

Hose and McDougall set down the sequence, the fees and the taboos in 1912 — which is why a practice that thinned out is describable at all, and also why the description is an outsider's. The Kayan of Borneo are not the Kayan of Myanmar; the names collide and the peoples do not.

Connected to

Named here by

Where each claim comes from
FieldTierSourceNote
defaultcitedThe Pagan Tribes of Borneo, Vol. II — scanned by the Internet Archive
text_thinferencewritten in Thai by this project, not machine-translated

Sources

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

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