The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga

Experience the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival portrait installation, The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga, by Manila-based photographer Jake Verzosa, bordering ROM’s Queen’s Park façade. This series of ten images laments and celebrates a dying tradition of tattooing in villages throughout the Cordillera Mountains in the northern Philippines. For nearly 1,000 years the Kalinga women have worn these lace-like patterns on their skin applied as part of an arduous and painful ritual; the vivid motifs reflecting a modest lifestyle and powerful bond with nature. As perceptions of beauty have changed throughout the Philippines, this traditional form of adornment has been largely abandoned.

Learn about the last remaining Kalinga tattooist, Fang-od Oggay, now in her late '90's and the most revered of Verzosa's degnified subjects as well as tattooing around the world in the ROM’s special exhibition Tattoos: Ritual. Identity. Obsession. Art.