traditionStick and poke
A needle, a thread of pigment, and no machine
Lychiang · CC BY-SA 4.0| Where it goes | arms, hands, legs, chest |
|---|---|
| Notes | A sewing needle with thread wound round it, or a professional cartridge held in a stabiliser pen. |
| Ink | Pen ink |
1,970 – 2,026 · The contemporary hand-poke scene, and its prison ancestor
51.5000, -0.1200 · OpenStreetMap
What it is
The one everybody has seen: a needle, ink, no machine — punk kitchens, prisons, and now studios that do nothing else.
The long version
Two lineages meet here and they are not the same thing. One is improvised: a sewing needle or a safety pin, ballpoint ink, done by a friend, associated with prisons and with people too young to be tattooed legally. The other is professional hand-poke, done with medical needles in a studio, which is now a standing style with its own practitioners.
Inference — this site lists it as a tradition because it is one, and because the same word covers both ends of it. The difference between the two is not the method; it is whether the needle is sterile and whether the person holding it has been taught.
Connected to
- Machine What it is defined against.
- What counts as hand-poked And the question that gets asked about it.
Named here by
- Pen ink Where it goes.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Stick and poke — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- Stick and poke — Wikipedia (en)
- Prison tattooing — Wikipedia (en)
- Russian criminal tattoos — 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