The traditions

Amazigh marks

North Africa: women's chin, forehead and hand marks, in a geometric vocabulary shared with weaving and pottery.

Atayal ptasan

Taiwan: a band down the forehead, and a second mark earned — by a man for taking a head, by a woman for mastering the loom.

Women's faces, marked between fifteen and twenty, in a pattern that names the tribe: full-face, part-face, dots, lines, or both.

Deq

Kurdistan: marks on women's faces, hands and feet, for protection, for health, and to say which tribe.

Derung face marks

Yunnan: Derung women marked on the face at twelve or thirteen, in a tradition now carried by a handful of elders.

Godna

Northern and central India: women's marks, pricked by women, carried out of India to the Caribbean by indentured labour.

Hajichi

The Ryukyu Islands: marks on the backs of women's hands, outlawed by Japan in 1899 and now being put back on.

Hlai women's marks

Hainan: Hlai women marked on face, throat, arms and legs in patterns that told one lineage from another.

Every up-country Burmese man wore one: a sheet of dark-blue animals from the navel to below the knee, begun in boyhood.

Japan: needles bound with silk to a wooden rod, worked by hand — *tebori*, carving by hand — over years, in a design that covers the body like a…

Konyak marks

Nagaland and across the Myanmar border: chest and face marks a man received for taking a head.

สักขาลาย

The Lanna leg tattoo: waist to knee, sometimes to the ankle, dense enough that the murals paint it as a pair of black trousers.

สักยันต์

Letters, numbers and figures arranged into a diagram — *yant* — and pricked into skin with a long needle.

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The same leg work as the Burmese, carried further — to the ankles, up the back, and on the specialists who tattooed everybody else's charms.

Bosnia: Catholic girls' forearms and hands marked with crosses, circles and fences, pricked with soot and honey.

The one everybody has seen: a needle, ink, no machine — punk kitchens, prisons, and now studios that do nothing else.

The Philippine traditions, tapped with a hafted thorn at ninety to a hundred and twenty strikes a minute.

Cordilleran whatok

The Cordillera mountains of northern Luzon, where Spanish rule never reached and the tattooing was never interrupted.

Iban tattooing

Borneo: tapped designs carved on a block and printed onto the skin, with hand marks reserved for a man who had taken a head.

Kayan tattooing

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

The Mentawai islands, west of Sumatra: long lines laid along arms, chest and legs, added to at each stage of a life.

Patutiki

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

Samoa: a comb of bone and turtle shell, struck with a mallet, covering a man from the middle of the back to the knees.

Veiqia

Fiji: girls marked at puberty by older women called *dauveiqia*, paid in tapa cloth and whale teeth.

Inuit tattoos: women's work on women's skin, stitched with a sooted thread drawn under the skin, or poked.

Hokkaido and Sakhalin: a woman's mouth ringed with indigo, begun in childhood and widened until she was ready to marry.

New Zealand: albatross-bone chisels struck with a mallet, cutting a groove that stays visible as texture, not only as colour.

The pilgrim's cross

Jerusalem and Egypt: a cross on the inside of the wrist, marking a pilgrimage — and a family that has been doing it for around seven hundred years.