The tattooed face women, a slowly dying tradition

by Nuria Falco Romagosa (Australia)

I didn't expect to find Myanmar

Lin Shwe Htang, from the Mun tribe is at her home. As her grandchildren sit down around her, she lights an old pipe with locally grown tobacco and starts smoking, slowly. She’s been a smoker for a very long time. She started as a child, to scare mosquitoes away and to warm up in winter. When Lin Shwe was around 14, she got her face tattooed with natural ink made with a mix of black charcoal and green tomato leaves, a very old tradition in her area. The process was so painful that other women had to held her down while the tattoo artist was carefully marking her face. The eyelid area was particularly hurtful, she recalls. However, she went through it twice more, to make the tattoo last longer. The outside of Lin Shwe Htang’s home, a small one-room dark bamboo hut, is full of animal skulls. Sometimes her family performs animal sacrifices, like other Animist villagers. In Chin State, Western Myanmar, people were originally Animists, believing that all animate and inanimate things possess a spirit or an essence. After the British colonisation in 1886, a vast majority converted. Nowadays, 90% of the population is Christian, but there are other villagers still holding Animist beliefs. In a nearby home, there’s a long wooden post with an egg placed on top of it to heal a family member who is sick. It is not clear how the tradition of female face tattoos originated. A widely believed story tells that at the time when Myanmar had Kings, they used to travel around the country looking for wives-to-be and taking the most beautiful girls to their personal ‘harem’. Since Chin women were renowned for their beauty and their parents didn’t want to see them taken away, they came up with a solution: tattooing the girls’ faces, so the King wouldn’t find them beautiful any more. As the tradition persisted and became the norm, face tattoos made the women feel beautiful and proud, turning into a necessity in order to find a husband. Today, the pride of having face tattoos can still be seen in the elder generations of Chin women. Every Chin tribe has a different tattoo pattern. This is why 67 year old Ning Shen shares Lin Shwe’s tattoo. However, the marks on her face are surprisingly clear: it’s because she got the tattoo done when she was 35. Her parents didn’t want her to get marked, so she waited until both of them had passed away. All her female friends and villagers had face tattoos, and she wanted them too. In a region of farmers with low income, the tattoo usually got paid with animals because the families had no money. To get hers, Ning Shen had to give away two chickens and two blankets. After getting the tattoo, her face was swollen for a week. Five years after, she got married. She now has nine children and several grandchildren, and continues to work as a farmer. In 1960, in an attempt to “modernise” the country, the government declared the practice illegal. However, it hasn’t been until recently that the tradition has become less and less common, not because of the law but because of a change in the mentality. In the Mun tribe, the youngest tattooed woman is 27 years old and doesn’t want to tattoo her daughters. Parents don’t want their daughters to go through the painful process and girls, having been in contact with the outside world -specially thanks to phone reception-, don’t find face tattoos appealing anymore. One of the oldest woman with face tatoos is 92-year old Yun Eian, from the Magan tribe. She has almost become a celebrity by playing the flute with her nose, something her mum taught her many moons ago. Nowadays Yun occasionally plays for tourists in exchange for some money, which helps the economy of her family. After playing a song for us, Yun Eian complains. At her age, she cannot blow the flute like before and the melody sounds very soft. We don’t care. It’s like with her face tattoos: the ink has faded over the years, but she is still beautiful.