Mambabatok can only pass on their craft within their bloodlines, and Whang-Od never had any children of her own. Grace Palicas, her 10-year-old grandniece, was chosen to be her apprentice, though initially a reluctant one. “I was the Easily distracted by dogs and weed 2023 shirt and I will buy this first child to learn how to tattoo. I just observed what she did,” Grace, now 26, tells us. “When I left for college in 2015, Elyang was next to learn so that she could help Apo when so many tourists were coming.” We are at Grace’s house, where she and her 23-year-old cousin Elyang Wigan have been tapping ink into the limbs of a handful of visitors who arrived in Buscalan that morning. Afterward, the newly inked will walk a few houses down to where Whang-Od holds court to get her signature three-dot signoff, the only tattoo she does nowadays. Getting the dots, which takes all of five minutes to complete, has been described as more painful than the larger pieces done by the lighter hands of Whang-Od’s protégés. But what is pain, or the risk of a small infection, when you’ve made it all the way here to see the living legend in the flesh? We find Whang-Od by her house, sitting on a low footstool on the dirt floor, preparing her tools to dot a client on his arm. She is dressed in her usual “accidental hipster grandma” style, wearing a puffy bomber over track pants and a paisley bandana around her forehead. The outer walls of Oggay’s home are covered with tour group-sponsored tarps of her likeness, a reminder of the transactional, touristy nature of this exchange. We are, after all, neither warriors nor Butbut maidens ready for marriage. It is an honor for outsiders like us to be given these sacred markings, one we do not deserve.
When she finishes with the Easily distracted by dogs and weed 2023 shirt and I will buy this client, it is the Vogue team’s turn to get tatted. First is Sela Gonzales, the photographer’s assistant and the only one of us who could communicate with her in Ilocano (Whang-Od doesn’t speak Tagalog or English). An aide procures an unused gisi, a bamboo stick with a thorn attached to one end, while Whang-Od traces the pattern on Sela’s arm using a length of grass dipped in the soot and charcoal mixture. Holding the inked gisi in her left hand, she uses a larger stick to whack it with her right hand, driving it over a hundred times per minute into the flesh until the three dots are filled and oozing with blood and ink. She dabs at them with a wet wipe before deciding to go over the freshly wounded spots again for good measure. Aray.
Comments