#kalingawomen

Photo by Verzosa (The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga)

The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga presents a series of portraits by Filipino photographer Jake Verzosa (born 1979) that lament and celebrate a dying tradition of tattooing in villages throughout the Cordillera mountains in the northern Philippines.

For nearly 1,000 years the Kalinga women have proudly worn these lace-like patterns, or batok, on their skin as symbols of beauty, wealth, stature and fortitude. Applied as part of a painful ritual, the vivid tattoos―abstractions of motifs such as ferns, rice bundles, centipedes and flowing rivers―reflect a rite of passage and a bond with nature. Yet today this intricate form of self-adornment has largely been abandoned. Between 2009 and 2013, Verzosa traveled extensively to document the last generation of women with the batok. His pictures reveal the artistic designs and symbolic functions of the tattoos. Accompanying Verzosa’s portraits is an illustrated glossary of the tattoo types and their meanings.

“The process of tattooing is known amongst the Kalinga people as batok, and the resulting designs are symbolic of strength and power – to the extent that dinuras (women who do not have tattoos) were typically viewed as imperfect, and shamed. For the men of the tribe, tattoos represent courage and the stages of being a Kalinga warrior, while for women they symbolise maturity, fertility and beauty. “A woman with tattoos shows that she is ready to marry and give birth to a child,” writes Natividad Sugguiyao in the text that accompanies The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga. “A woman who declines to be tattooed is said to be barren” (Belle Hutton, Another Magazine).

Photo by Verzosa (The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga)

Photo by Verzosa (The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga)

Photo by Verzosa (The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga)