Indeed, with white hair tied back in a black “tribal streetwear” headscarf and solid silver earrings shaped to mimic the female reproductive system, Whang-Od may be less than five feet tall, but her reputation carries weight

(Opposite, clockwise from left) Animal bones are hung outside houses to bring luck and good fortune; Tattoo artist Claire Sagmayao, 18 years old; Today there are more or less 20 different traditional designs on offer; Tattoo artist Emily Oggay, 24 years old meaning is ascribed to each symbol, and the opportunity to meet Whang- Od is incredibly cool. She’s even older than my gran.” He began queuing for this particular tattoo at 7am, and it takes eight hours before he’s finally seen, by which point he’s given up trying to choose his own design from the 20 emblems available. Whang- Od doesn’t mind—she prefers choosing for her customers anyway—and quickly identifies a diamond shaped crab, representing travel and adventure. “I love it,” Daniel says later, admiring his swollen bicep. “It hurts like hell, but it’s so cool.”

Whang- Od laughs at the audible awe of her customers, who frequently stutter in her presence and occasionally even burst into tears when they realise she’ll be completing their tattoos. “I’m no different from any of the other women in our village,” she says, declining all offers of a chair in favour of squatting on the floor, arms wrapped neat around her knees; gold sequined ballet pumps pointed forwards to catch the light. “I just have a slightly different job. And I’ve lived a little longer than most of them.”

A little longer than all of them, in fact. Whang- Od isn’t the oldest resident of the village—that accolade belongs to a 106-year-old blacksmith round the corner, who continues to spend his days sharpening blades hammered by his sons and grandsons. Both he and WhangOd own certificates proving their birth dates, although there’s some dispute over whether or not they may have been registered a year or two late. But over the course of the 83 years since she started working, Whang- Od appears to have changed the course of Buscalan’s future.

“I didn’t plan to do this when I grew up,” she explains. “When I was little, girls only had the option of becoming housewives. But my uncle and father were the tribe’s tattoo artists, and when they became too old, they asked me to take over so that we could still afford to buy rice.” She was 15 years old at the time, and had already been out of school for three years because of local conflicts. “My family didn’t have any money for food or clothes or education,” she remembers. “People come to our village now and look around and think, ‘oh, they must be very poor,’ but they have no idea. We may still live a simple life, but we can eat three meals a day now. Before, we struggled to eat one.”

The tattoos originally represented warfare and beauty. Men were inked after completing their first kill, while women covered their bodies with snakeskin and fertility symbols upon reaching puberty. They weren’t intended as a tourist attraction. “That happened by mistake,” explains Weber. “Every year a few trekkers would stumble across the village and see our tattoos, so word got out very gradually. Ten years ago, a documentary maker called the ‘Tattoo Hunter’ turned up, and asked to film Whang- Od. After that, everything seemed to change overnight.” Whang- Od nods. “Every design has a meaning,” she says. “They protect us, and make us more powerful in our own skin. When visitors arrived and said they wanted to pay me to tattoo their skin too, I thought, ‘OK, you are not a ButBut, but why shouldn’t you be powerful and protected too?’”

It’s not cultural appropriation, she argues; rather a exchange of tattooing traditions that has even seen artists from Australia and Singapore make the trip to photograph their electromagnetic rotary machines next to Whang- Od’s Tupperware box of dried thorns and bamboo sticks. Several of the younger girls in the village have Westernised tattoos on their ankles and thighs, and one modern design— depicting a heartbeat morphing into a heart and a cross—has proved so popular within the community that it’s now offered on the official menu. “I don’t like that one so much,” says Whang- Od. “But if that’s what the visitors want then it’s good that they can get it.” She directs