Humans of China: "Tattooing Parts of My Body Was so Painful and Scary That I Wet Myself"

This article comes from Humans of China (WeChat ID: humans-of-china), which aims to document and tell the stories of the many varied people of this vast country, one individual at a time. The following account comes from a lady of the Li minority in China's Hainan province. Read the original post (with Chinese) here.

Tattooing parts of my body were so painful. So painful and scary that at one point I wet myself. I also cried, cried a lot. I was just 15 at the time and there was an old lady who would help tattoo the young girls in our village for free. I have tattoos on my face, my neck, my chest, and my hands. Apart from my hands, they were all around the same amount of pain. Tattooing my hands wasn't pain-free but it was bearable and it bled a lot.

My face took a day to finish. We started in the morning and just before lunch, we stopped to clean it. It also gave me some time to recover a little. In the afternoon we started again over the same lines we had tattooed in the morning. After, my face was really swollen and painful, I found it hard to smile and open my mouth to eat and drink. The three lines on my chest just took half a day to complete and my hands just a couple of hours. My hands also became very swollen after we had finished.

When I was younger I thought they looked beautiful and I did want them. Every woman I knew had tattoos so I wanted to fit in. Since growing older they have faded a little and now I don't think they look so good and I don't particularly like them. My mum thought it was important for me and my sisters to have tattoos but she had a lot more than we did. Her body was covered from her feet to her face, legs, and arms with black lines and patterns made with a sharp thorn found on trees and ink they made with walnuts. We needed them to stay safe. Girls with tattoos were deemed as ugly and ugly girls were not wanted. Girls without tattoos had more risk of being kidnapped to be sold or raped by other men outside of our minority. 

I was the youngest and this year I am 87 years old. Sadly all my sisters have now died. Our tattoos were not all the same, some of us had more, some had less but we all experienced the painful process. My dad didn't have any and nor did my one bother. It wasn't common for men to have tattoos and really, only ladies had them. I married my husband at the age of 22, he didn't have any but he liked mine. I did have some old photos of us two together but I can't find them now. My parents told me he was a good man and that I needed to marry him. We were farmers, mainly growing rice and in the extremely hot summers here it was tough. We had three boys and three girls but the girls don't have any tattoos.

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Photos courtesy of Cameron Hack