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Hand Poke EN ไทย

traditionPatutiki

patu tiki · Marquesan

To strike the image

TappedMethod
RevivedStill done?
bothWhose skin
specialistWho marks it
Where it goeswhole body, face, legs, hands
Stopped byFrench administration and Catholic mission
NotesThe densest body coverage recorded anywhere in the Pacific.
InkSoot and water
Years between1900–1980 (80)

about 1,500 – 2,026 · Suppressed by mission and administration; documented by Handy in 1922, revived since the 1980s

-9.8000, -139.0500 · OpenStreetMap

What it is

The Marquesas: coverage so complete that Willowdean Handy's 1922 survey had to be drawn panel by panel to record it.

The long version

Handy's Tattooing in the Marquesas is a Bishop Museum bulletin, out of copyright, and it is a catalogue of motifs recorded when very few marked people were left. The name says the method: patu tiki, to strike the image.

Where each claim comes from
FieldTierSourceNote
defaultcitedTattooing in the Marquesas — 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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