Tebori – Traditional Japanese Methods
It is worth noting that the very word ‘Tebori’ itself can literally be translated as ‘to carve, sculpt or inscribe.’
Tools for Japanese tattoo methods were first made with sharpened bamboo to serve as needles, graduating to steel needles as time progressed. The entire tool itself is closest in appearance to a pen, with a long narrow bamboo handle and the needle sitting at the tip end. Single or multiple needles can be used. To use the tool, an artist will dip it in ink and push the needle manually into the skin – stretching and supporting skin with one hand, pricking with the other. Specific hand rhythms and movements were and are employed to give gradations and specific shadings.
Masters of the skill still practice in the modern day, and often have the seemingly paradoxical advice to offer that tattooing should be done with careful, ‘gentle’ puncturing. Their methods are wholly unusual when compared to modern tattoo machine usage – consider that the handle-with-needles tool is held by the tattooist from the far end, whereas a modern machine is held very close to the needle, in much the same way as one would grip a pencil.

Polynesian and Micronesian methods

For the Polynesian and Micronesian cultures, a rake-head shaped tool was tapped across the skin to create tattoos. Tools were referred to as combs, chisels or rakes for their multiple needle construction. Earliest needles consisted of things such as bird bone, turtle shell, bamboo, animal teeth and even sharp teeth; they were attached to a wooden handle. Needles were soaked in ink, they were laid against the skin and then the wooden handle was ‘tapped’ to push them into the skin.

Assistants were required for this method to help stretch and hold the area of skin being tattooed

Maori Tattoo methods

Adapted the technique that they had already evolved for wood-carving: a bone-cutter tool that was first used to shape wood was now employed upon skin. This was called uhi – essentially a tattoo chisel – that cut directly into the skin. Incisions were made and then ink was rubbed into the open cuts, or added to the incisions with a new serrated uhi that had been dipped in pigment.

Unusually, these tattoos caused the skin to heal with the groove of the wounds intact; scars usually tend to heal smooth or raised, and the prevention of this occurrence was thought to possibly have something to do with the ink used, involving a particular process of manufacture and a special caterpillar species.

A tattoo done by this method was undoubtedly hugely painful, and many of the rituals surrounding the practice seem designed as useful distractions for the subjects! Music and chanting were integral elements, for example.

Maori tattooing methods changed in the 1700s when European explorers landed in New Zealand with supplies of metal.

Ancient Tattoo methods of Borneo!

The ritual and symbolic significance of tattooing from ancient Borneo is evidenced by the meticulous way in which they packaged and presented their tools.

There is for example a “tattoo box” artifact, a carved figurine of a hippo, carrying a man, a woman and a basket on its back: the basket would have held the mixed pigment, and the body of the hippo contained all the rest of the equipment needed to tattoo. This included ‘stencil stamps’ and a needle and tap tool. The needle was a wooden stick with a needle emerging from it’s top at a ninety degree angle; a second, plain stick was tapped onto this stick in order to insert the pigment dipped needle into the skin.

Credits: Article – Rachel Kennedy

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