The Lumix was capturing every bit of the tattoo session, from a comfortable distance. They call it “dutdutan,” where art and commerce – pleasure and pain – marry. Then again, there’s a difference between watching someone get tattooed, and being tattooed. Thank goodness I wasn’t seated on that chair.
Back in college, I was enamored by a professor’s lecture-exhibit on tattooing and tooth-staining in the Cordillera. She showed us pictures and videos of how ritual tattooing was done in places where there were no tattoo parlors. A man burned a sharpened stick of guava wood to soot, and the slow and painful process of “dutdutan” took place. The designs were meaningful, although the prospect of getting tattooed with a very simple instrument looked – at least from where we were seated – extremely painful indeed.
That was many years ago: a bunch of soon-to-be – and wannabe – anthropologists have to unlearn cringing and squirming in the name of turning cultural curiosities into scientific discoveries. Yet when I heard the tattoo gun start whirring and buzzing in the background, I felt my knees go weak. Heck, I wasn’t the one getting tattooed, but my good friend, roxstar + photographer extraordinaire, Fritz Tentativa.
So, will this entry come across as a difficult-to-read blog entry that’s a futile attempt at trying to write a magazine article on the Internet? Why, yes, of course.
