venueWat Bang Phra

วัดบางพระ · wat bang phra

Tattoos daily from eight in the morning, and once a year the yant come alive.

Sakyant at English Wikipedia · Public domain

13.8014, 100.2225 · OpenStreetMap

What it is

A monastery in Nakhon Chaisi district, Nakhon Pathom, about 50 km west of Bangkok. It is the sak yant place outsiders have heard of, and the one the film crews go to. It is not where most sak yant is done.

The long version

Inference — the sak yant most people receive is done by an ajarn or a monk near where they live, at a small samnak with a teacher whose name travels no further than the province. Wat Bang Phra is famous, photographed and easy to reach from Bangkok, and those are three facts about its visibility rather than about the practice.

The temple dates to the late eighteenth century, just before the second fall of Ayutthaya. Its name means the monastery of the riverbank Buddha image: two images were being carried downriver away from the Burmese, the boat sank, and when they were pulled out they stayed here.

Luang Phor Pern. The abbot who made the place. He ordained here at 25, learned sak yant from the abbot before him, Luang Pu Him, and carried it on when Luang Pu Him died four years later. He was never tattooed himself and never would be.

In 1953 he went to walk in the forest on the Kanchanaburi border, where tigers had been mauling and killing villagers. He gave them kata and sak yant, and told them the tiger yantra in particular would turn an attack. The reputation that followed is the reason the leaping tiger is on so many backs, and the reason devotional pictures of him show him meditating on a tiger.

He built a bridge over the river so farmers could get crops to market, and the local public hospital, which carries his name. He died in 2002 at 79.

Wai Khru, every March. The power of a tattoo or an amulet drops off with time, so once a year disciples come back to their master to have it blessed and re-empowered. At Wat Bang Phra that gathering is the festival everybody has seen film of.

One thing the article is blunt about: the sanitation of the needle and the ink is unknown, and a traditional tattoo carries a blood-borne infection risk. It also notes that UNAIDS records no case of HIV transmitted by a tattoo needle, on the grounds that the needle holds no reservoir of blood. Both of those sentences are in the source; neither cancels the other.

How

The day. Arrive about 8:00. Buy the offering before going in — flowers, incense and cigarettes of Luang Phor Pern's brand, 150 baht as of November 2022 — take off your shoes, sit down in the line and take a number. People are tattooed in groups of roughly twenty, and the monk blesses each batch of offerings as the group comes up.

You do not choose. The first is almost always the Gao Yord, nine spires, in the centre of the upper back and slightly onto the neck. The second extends it to Yeesip Gao Yord, twenty-nine spires, across the shoulders. After those two the body is considered open, and what comes next is what the monk judges will do you good.

The hands. Two people who have just been tattooed stay behind to hold the next person still and keep the skin flat. That custom has survived the arrival of the electric machine, which is now what most of the work is done with.

For women the monk uses a transparent ink and wears a glove, so as not to touch a woman's body.

Connected to

• Sak yant The practice.
• Gao yod, the nine spires What you get first.
• Suea phen, the leaping tiger What the tiger story produced.
• The rules that come with it What you take on with it.

Named here by

• Gao yod, the nine spires Where.
• The rules that come with it Where Wai Khru happens.
• Sak yant The one outsiders have heard of.
• Suea phen, the leaping tiger Whose forest.
• What this site does not have Its festival date and its prices move; the record says so.

This record as JSON