Hand Tapped

This is a technique rather than a single culture: a manual method in which a comb or point of bone, shell, tooth, or wood is lashed to a handle and driven into the skin by striking it with a second stick, the ink usually soot based. It is the shared ancestral method across much of the Pacific and island Southeast Asia, the practice the Samoans call tatau, from which the English word tattoo derives, and which involved a tattooist tapping the pigment while an assistant stretched the skin.

It is distinct from Western single needle stick and poke and from Japanese tebori, which are separate manual lineages. This is the home for practitioners working within the broader struck instrument tradition whose specific cultural school is undocumented or mixed.