The artist’s hands are steady yet strong. A wrong move could yield dire results: too deep and a nerve might be damaged, too weak and the paint won’t stick.

The worst part was not the physical pain, but rather how the process slowly breaks you down mentally and emotionally. The loss of large quantities of blood did not help, either. The stick with the three thorns (for the second layer of the tattoo) is brutal, as it goes through already-wounded skin a second and third time. Rarely in life have I questioned my willpower. “What the fuck am I doing here?” I questioned myself and, by doing so, began the process of breaking down emotionally. When your body is in shock, and saving your ego doesn’t matter anymore, all you want is for the pain to end.

In the silence of the mind of a broken man, all pretenses are washed away. All that is left is the truth; a mind in synch with the heart.

Three hours into the process, that’s exactly what happened: I had cathartic, self-revelatory moment of complete honesty.

All of a sudden, I felt I had enough. In my mind, I had conceded and I walked away. I was shivering under the scorching sunlight. My sweat was cold and all I wanted to do was throw up and call it a day.

It was the combination of a 30-minute break, encouragement from my friends and my partner, and seeing Fang Oud patiently sitting on her little wooden stool waiting for me to regroup. Her tiny, ancient eyes were smiling at me in sympathy. After sixty years of tattooing and having been a recepient of this traditional rite herself, she knew what I was going through. I finally knew what it meant to dig very deep, to find every last ounce of strength and courage to master a situation that had already defeated you.

The result, in the end, was a masterpiece by a master. The process is excruciating, but the juice is worth the squeeze. The tattoo was fantastic in all its flaws. Its rawness radiated perfection. And its creator was proud of my appreciation. It humbled me, and in some inexplicable way, I gained another layer of maturity.

There were no major celebrations that night; just a relaxed evening under the moon and a very deep, satisfying sleep to recover my strength. Leaving the next day was bittersweet. It is hard to quantify what the trip meant to its travelers. The unfortunate reality is that humans are so limited by words. Emotions and experiences have to be reduced to a combination of letters when the dictionary of the spirit should have no limits.

Why did I do it? Many have asked. Initially, I thought it was about cementing my sense of country, to prove that I am more Filipino than I am Swiss. But the reasons have changed. This was about breaking down borders and  judgments.

I find it sad that Fang Oud’s clients consist mostly of foreigners. The locals don’t seem interested or, worse, don’t even know the practice still exists. At 87, she is the last of the original artists in the Cordilleras. She is training a 12-year-old girl who, she claims, needs another eight years of training. By that time she will be 95. There is a large chance that when Fang Oud passes away, the practice will go extinct—along with much of the culture her generation has tirelessly preserved.

They still hold rituals and dances—usually in reverence for the cycles of life, deaths, and births—but year after year is slowly fading into memory. Sooner or later, the ways of the Kalinga will be gone forever, and Fang Oud knows it.
She cried when she told us that she is the last of the tattoo artists. Her tears tugged something deep in my soul, too. Whatever the fate of this dying Philippine art—a skill so untainted by the modern world—I take consolation from a singular, sobering fact: history will always be on my back.

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