【Dear Utol (2025): Kilay is Life Episode 42】
The Dear Utol (2025): Kilay is Life Episode 42Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga
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Jake Verzosa,Abo Nao Sicdawag, b. 1924, Lubo, Tanudan, 2011.
When Whang-Od was twenty-five, the man she loved was killed in a logging accident. She had never married, nor did she have children. After the death of her boyfriend, she dedicated herself to her role as mamababatok, or tattoo artist. Whang-Od is now 101, and in the Cordillera mountains of the northern Philippines, where she lives among the Kalinga people, she is a legend.
Between 2009 and 2013, the Manila-based photographer Jake Verzosa traveled to the Cordillera mountains and photographed Kalinga women whose bodies bear these tattoos, known as batok. Whang-Od is the last mamabatok, and The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga, a collection of Verzosa’s photographs, documents her work. Alternately described as “dead,” “dying,” “extinct,” or “endangered,” batokis a practice that lives on in Versoza’s images, and also in the Kalinga, who are, Verzosa emphasizes, still here. “When I pass on,” says Whang-Od, “I will bring my tattoos with me in the afterlife. Everything else is left behind.”
Sin-ao Gammod, b. 1933, Lubo, Tanudan, 2011.
Fang-od Oggay, b. 1920, Buscalan, Tinglayan, 2011.
Kannao La-ib, b. 1939, Buscalan, Tinglayan, 2011.
Bayada Gumaad, b. 1933, Lubo, Tanudan, 2013.
Catalina Dangpason, b. 1948, Dacalan, Tanudan, 2011.
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