130 records on 28 traditions of marking skin by hand — who is marked, who does the marking, where on the body, and whether anyone is still doing it. Bilingual English and Thai, every claim tiered and sourced.
Live: https://wichaa.net/handpoke/ — the home since 2026-09-21. The
GitHub Pages copy at nanobotco.github.io/hand-poke/ is redirect stubs now; a
static host cannot answer 301, so each address carries a canonical, a meta
refresh and a link. The corpus count that used to be the whole of the wichaa
page kept its own door at /handpoke/corpus/.
130 records across 14 types, 216 links between them, 157 sources including 8 out-of-copyright books fetched whole, 146 fields written in Thai, 39 pictures each with its author and licence.
The tattoo is clothing. 6 traditions here have a source that compares
the finished work to a garment, in four languages across three centuries — and a
Cordilleran rule recorded in English: Burmese thigh work
as "a skin-tight pair of caleçons" (Shway Yoe, 1882), Lanna work as "black trousers", Visayan
work as "a kind of handsome armor", and untattooed Samoan and Cordilleran men as naked — in
the ordinary word, not as a figure of speech. Every quote is printed with its source at
/clothing/.
The leg-tattoo zone crosses modern Thailand rather than stopping at its border. Burma,
the Shan States and Lanna tattooed men from the waist down. Leslie Milne's 1910 line that
"the Siamese… tattoo themselves very slightly, or not at all" is a statement about central
Siam; Lanna was a tributary kingdom until 1899 and is on the other side of her comparison.
The zone is drawn at /legs/ from four written sources and one manuscript, and the map says
that nobody surveyed it.
13 of 28 traditions have a Wikipedia article about the
tattooing itself. For the other 15 it is a section inside an
article about the people. Counted in language editions at /coverage/ — a count of
attention, not of importance.
In 4,710 transcribed pages of the wichaa.net manuscript
corpus, สักขาลาย — the Lanna leg tattoo — appears on
1. Counted at /legs/, with every word it could be called and
what each count is an upper bound on.
72 of the marks recorded here go on skin that clothing covers and
40 on skin it does not — and the bans land almost entirely on the second
kind. At /body/.
python3 tools/fetch_wiki.py # the drafting corpus (gitignored)
python3 tools/fetch_books.py # the out-of-copyright books (gitignored)
python3 tools/harvest_langlinks.py # language editions per tradition
python3 tools/harvest_corpus.py # the manuscript counts, if the corpus is local
python3 tools/harvest_commons.py --harvest --apply # pictures, with their licences
./publish.sh # validate, build, draw, check links, into docs/
python3 tools/serve.py 8817 # a local preview, mounted where the host mounts it
No blood, no open wounds, nothing that turns a person into a specimen. Historical
photographs are named for what they are, including the ones made to be sold to a European
audience. tools/validate.py errors on a caption that reads as blood unless the record
carries x_blood_ok, and the gate is a backstop for looking at the picture.
Records and text CC BY 4.0. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0; books scanned by the Internet Archive and out of copyright; pictures per file with the author beside each one; country outlines from Natural Earth, public domain. Code MIT. See NOTICE.txt.
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All of it, counted: https://nanobotco.github.io/index/ · roster as JSON: https://nanobotco.github.io/index/fleet.json