How did a 106-year-old woman in the rural Filipino mountains become one of the most famous tattoo artists in the world? We travel north to Kalinga to meet the ButBut tribe—and discovers an ancient tradition indelibly inked into our culture
Whang-Od walks past her tomb every day when she leaves the house. Dug out into the damp ground, the 103-year-old admits that she often forgets it’s there altogether. Rumour has it, the village children don’t realise its purpose and sometimes use it for hide and seek. Only her teenage grand-nieces treat it with trepidation. “Sometimes when I see it, I have to look the other way,” says Elayang, 18, who shares her elderly relative’s wicked sense of humour, her warm and quiet smile, and ink-stained fingertips. “My Apo is the strongest, bravest woman I’ve ever known. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be just like her. It’s like she’s the foundation of our whole community. We all know that when she dies, everything will change.”
Elayang isn’t exaggerating. The oldest tattoo artist in the world, and the first female tattoo artist in the Philippines, Whang-Od isn’t so much an inspiration as an institution—as much a part of the ButBut tribe’s culture and history as the ancient Kalinga mountainside they call home.
Indeed, every week, an average of 300 urban visitors make the 19-hour pilgrimage from Manila to Buscalan to pay 500 pesos and plead with the wrinkled matriarch to dip a thorn into a thick black paste of cooking soot and permanently sign their skin. Beads of blood bubble as she hammers its point with a wand of bamboo and pierce virgin epidermis to form wavy, uneven lines of teeny tiny dots.
It’s an exercise in both pain management and lung capacity. A nauseatingly serpentine ascent by coach is punctuated with a vertiginously steep hour’s long hike through wet rice paddies, sending day trippers’ flip-flopped feet slipping on the worn down stepping stones as one of the tribe’s 76 gazelle-like local guides waits patiently ahead. There’s no phone signal for smartphones, wifi doesn’t exist, and villagers communicate across the hillside via antennae-d walkie-talkies. “We know we live in a different era from Manila and Cebu or countries like England and America,” says resident Richard Weber, who was born and raised in the village in the 1970s. “I think it says a lot about Whang-Od if this many people have heard about her, even though we’re this cut off.”