Ancient tattoos may be different from the modern body art of today, but one ASU student is working to make sure early tattoos are appreciated as culturally significant.

Lars Krutak, a doctoral candidate in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and self-described “tattoo anthropologist,” is writing a book about a method of ancient tattooing, entitled “Voices of the Ancestors: The Living Tradition of Kalinga Batok (Tattoo).”

Kalinga is a small province in the Philippines, and Krutak’s book will focus on the culture and tattoo methods he said are believed to be 1,000 years old.

“Our goal is to produce an illustrated, bilingual [English and Kalinga], medium to large-format paperback book joining the photographic images of the tattooed Kalinga elders to their voices, oral histories and Kalinga myths and legends to comprehend the complex meanings behind their intricately beautiful tattoos,” Krutak said.

Krutak said the project is urgent because there are less than 200 Kalinga elders who still retain their full-body tattoos. As part of his research, Krutak lived with one of them, an 89-year-old woman named Whang Od, for 3 weeks in a Kalinga village.

Kalinga people follow traditional tattooing methods and use an orange thorn placed in a bamboo stick, which is tapped into the skin with a wooden mallet about 100 to 120 times a minute, Krutak said.

“Kalinga tattooing is an important vehicle for expressing and reinforcing the psychological dimensions of life, health, warfare, religion and death,” Krutak said. “It is a cultural practice deeply rooted within the memory of the Kalinga’s ancestral life and embodies personal, social, ecological and metaphysical values through a wide array of visual tattoo symbolism.”

Krutak said the meaning behind the expression found in tattooing has changed in modern western cultures but still sees tattoos as a cultural vehicle for expression.

“Although both traditional tribal and modern day tattoos carry important meanings and messages for their owners, traditional tattoos are more completely integrated into the complex cultures that produced them than here in the West,” Krutak said.

Amanda Conti, an employee at Tattooed Planet in Tempe, has seen countless tattoos.

“People come in here and want tattoos for a variety of different reasons,” she said. “A lot of people want to commemorate something like a death or a birthday.”

Conti said she had a woman who survived breast cancer, but lost her nipple as a result of the surgery. The woman, she said, wanted a nipple tattooed onto her breast to help heal the emotional scars.
“The women told me that when she steps out of the shower and looks at herself she is almost whole again,” Conti said.

Manuel Flowers, a 25-year-old tattoo artist, said people just have different ways of expressing themselves.

“I have my daughter’s portrait, a tattoo machine and rings on my fingers that show that I am committed,” Flowers said. “Those are things that are important to me.

Krutak said despite their changing meanings in modern times, tattoos are an important piece of understanding a culture.

“The anthropological and academic world is obviously worried about endangered languages and endangered peoples, but if only they would also place indigenous tattooing in the same sentence then I think we would be in a better place,” he said.

Reach the reporter at jaking5@asu.edu.