The hands behind the marks

Across many Indian tattoo traditions, women were both the makers and the wearers of permanent marks. They held designs in memory, prepared pigments, managed pain and aftercare, and understood when a mark belonged on a girl’s or woman’s body. Their work joined technical skill to ritual authority and social knowledge.

There was never one national system. Korathi women travelled through the old Mysore region. Gond and Badna specialists crossed into Baiga settlements. In Gujarat, Mer women and itinerant Vaghari or Nat practitioners worked from village to village. Each relationship had its own language, status and rules.

Lars Krutak describes a historical pattern that reaches across several regions: tattooing by hand, often by women for women, compensated with grain, rice, fruit, betel or other food. The exchange placed tattooing within local systems of service, reciprocity and subsistence rather than a modern retail transaction.

The record is not absolute. Around 1900, Korathi tattooists received rice, plantains, betel leaves and nuts, sometimes with cash added. Contemporary practitioners such as Rajpati Devi in Jharkhand now charge cash for designs. There is no national dataset measuring this change, but regional accounts show a movement from in-kind exchange toward cash work.

Women’s tattoos could record childhood, marriage, fertility, motherhood, beauty, caste or community belonging. Baiga women accumulated marks across life stages. Mer girls received tattoos before marriage. In Mithila and other parts of Bihar, godna could make social identity visible on hands, arms and faces.

The same mark did not mean the same thing everywhere. Protection from predatory attention, recognition after death, permanent jewellery, spiritual merit and simple beautification all appear in the record. They belong to particular communities and testimonies, not to an undifferentiated idea of Indian womanhood.

Historical writing often preserved the motif but not the woman who made it. Colonial surveys catalogued communities and bodies while leaving tattooists unnamed. Photographs recorded wearers without their voices. The absence of names is not evidence that authorship did not matter. It shows whose knowledge the archive was built to recognise.

Living records offer another path. Rajpati Devi identifies herself as a fifth-generation Malar godna artist. Ramkeli Paole leads women carrying Surguja designs onto cloth. Gond women in Jamgala organise around godna as cultural and economic work. These names reposition women as authors rather than anonymous bearers of tradition.

The older economy has been widely displaced by electric-machine tattooing, cash payment and studios in which men are more visible as professional artists and clients. In the shift Krutak identifies, work once made by women for women is increasingly made by men for men. What changes is not only the tool. Authority, income, audience and ownership move with it.

The contrast is not complete. Some male artists now practise hand-poked revival, and some women work in contemporary studios. Nor did women dominate every Indian tradition. The value of the comparison is that it makes labour visible: cultural revival cannot be measured only by whether an old motif appears again.

When godna moves onto cloth or canvas, women can create income and keep a visual language in public circulation. When motifs enter urban tattoo studios, younger wearers may encounter histories that were once dismissed. Both forms can be meaningful, but neither automatically restores the social world that made the practice.

Responsible revival asks who is named, who is paid, who gives permission and who can explain the mark. It keeps community-specific meanings intact and acknowledges uncertainty. Most importantly, it places women’s labour at the centre of the story rather than treating their bodies as an image bank for contemporary design.