Do you have a sak yant or have you ever been tempted to get one? 

 

Before getting any kind of a tattoo, it's always a good idea to get a check-up from the neck up.

There may be a screw loose somewhere.

3 hours ago, AnnaBanana said:

There may be a screw loose somewhere.

Don't we all friend?

5 hours ago, chawbdurian said:

Do you have a sak yant or have you ever been tempted to get one? 

 

Yes, I paid 200,000B for a special one that protects me from Bob posts. 

18 hours ago, chawbdurian said:

Do you have a sak yant or have you ever been tempted to get one?

Interesting that you are pronouncing/indicating a (t) sound at the end of 'yant'. In Thai language the 't' would be silent due to the 'gaaran' symbol above it. 

7 hours ago, ColeBOzbourne said:

Interesting that you are pronouncing/indicating a (t) sound at the end of 'yant'

Yea it is one of those funny things about Thai to English. Sak Yant is how Thais and westerners tend to spell it so I stuck with that. 

The practice of tattooing in Lanna T'ai was remarked upon by nearly all the early visitors to Chiang Mai, from Ralph Fitch in 1582 onwards.

In 1844 the French Catholic Missionary, M. Grandjean wrote an extensive report on the region that was published in Annales de la Propagation de la Foi.

Tattooing didn't escape his attention in a short aside: "There are two kinds of Laocians [Kohn Muang] - one of whom are called Thong Dahm, that is, Black-bellies, and the other, who are called Thong Khao, that is White-bellies.

They are thus named because the men of the race of Black-bellies, when they arrive at the age of fourteen or sixteen years, are accustomed to to have drawn upon their bodies different figures of men, flowers, elephants, tigers, serpents, and other animals. This operation they perform by making, by means of needles joined together, a number of punctures upon the epidermis; they then apply a black ink, which brings out all the designs traced upon the skin, they quietly bathe themselves afterwards, and the impression is ineffaceable. The tattooing is not executed without pain. However as the young Laocians cannot obtain wives if they lack this kind of beauty, there is not one amongst them who does not voluntarily submit to this painful operation. 

The White-bellies,on the contrary, are contented with their natural graces."

 Plus ca change... is an expression that comes to mind.

Was in Samoa for a while ---watched a few Pe'a Tattoo's in the girls village that I was going with--- all done with the sharp wood and ---Tap tap. They dont say a word while its being done.   

 

I had a small blue Bird Tat on my shoulder when I was 15 and passed out.........

 

 

One of the likely places to get a Sak Yant is, of course, Wat Bang Phra (Nakhon Chai Si District, Nakhon Pathom 73120, Thailand). From what I heard it is very busy, I myself have never been there.

 

For those living around Udon Thani, contact Ajahn Gai, his Samnak is very close to the airport, he learned in his youth at Wat Bang Phra. +66 61 054 00 30 or https://www.facebook.com/titired.tavi.1

 

My own Sak Yants come from him.

14 hours ago, chawbdurian said:

Yea it is one of those funny things about Thai to English. Sak Yant is how Thais and westerners tend to spell it so I stuck with that.

Thank you. I've been studying Thai and was just curious about that. 

Only a person dealing with mental issues or some form of retardation would have themselves extensively tattooed.

Not only is it an act of disfiguring your own body, but also the danger of having so much carbon-based ink under your skin.

It couldn't possibly be good for you and might very well be harmful in the long run.

As a kid I remember seeing oldtimers from WWII whose patriotic tattoos had faded and transfused into blue blobs on their forearms.

That alone was enough to put me off from ever having it done to myself.

11 hours ago, jts-khorat said:

One of the likely places to get a Sak Yant is, of course, Wat Bang Phra (Nakhon Chai Si District, Nakhon Pathom 73120, Thailand). From what I heard it is very busy, I myself have never been there.

 

For those living around Udon Thani, contact Ajahn Gai, his Samnak is very close to the airport, he learned in his youth at Wat Bang Phra. +66 61 054 00 30 or https://www.facebook.com/titired.tavi.1

 

My own Sak Yants come from him.

How have things been going since you got that Sak Yant tattoo?

Fully protected now from bad Ju-Ju?

Impervious to bullets, spears, and war-clubs?

Able to walk unscathed through minefields?

Now even the most dangerous areas of SE Asia can be your playground with no fear of the jungle-bunnies that might do you some harm.

2 minutes ago, VillageIdiot said:

How have things been going since you got that Sak Yant tattoo?

Fully protected now from bad Ju-Ju?

Impervious to bullets, spears, and war-clubs?

Able to walk unscathed through minefields?

Now even the most dangerous areas of SE Asia can be your playground with no fear of the jungle-bunnies that might do you some harm.

 

Your comments seem weirdly antagonistic for no reason. I simply answered the question of the OP.

 

Normally I make a point not to interact with the village idiots, so it seems unlikely that we know each other.

 

As such, I suggest that you STFU.

I'm generally of the same mind with the naysayers on this subject, but getting a small tattoo when you're younger is forgivable... I've even forgiven myself.

At the age of 12 [back in the Dark Ages] I had a heart with some little flowers and a scroll through it with my then girlfriend's name tattooed on my upper right arm by a Carny who said he believed me when I told him I was 18.

In that pre-Police State USA we young people were Free - with a capital "F".  Free to make mistakes and suffer the consequences.

Getting tattooed was the stupidest thing I had done up until then. It attracted so much unwanted attention - due to my young age - that I had it surgically removed two years later. That was in the late '50s before lasers started to be used for tattoo removal.

This early boomer experience cured me of any desire to get another one when the '80s came around and later generations went in for getting tatted-up in a big way,

On 9/16/2025 at 4:21 AM, ColeBOzbourne said:

Interesting that you are pronouncing/indicating a (t) sound at the end of 'yant'. In Thai language the 't' would be silent due to the 'gaaran' symbol above it. 

 

It was written in English so the Thai version is neither here not there, but maybe it was the Thais that got it wrong when they transliterated it from the Sanskrit original which I understand was Yantra?

14 hours ago, treetops said:

 

It was written in English so the Thai version is neither here not there, but maybe it was the Thais that got it wrong when they transliterated it from the Sanskrit original which I understand was Yantra?

 

No, everything is exactly as it should be. Sak Yant (สักยันต์) comes indeed from the Pali word Yantra.

 

It is not derived from Sanskrit, as you assume, as the basis of Thai Theravadan Buddhism is Pali. Sanskrit as a member of the same Pakrit language family is used by later Mahayana schools (it has an even more evolved mystical-mathematical grammatic than Pali, later used in Hinduist mathematics to absolute fascinating heights...).

 

As such, the last consonant of the Pali word stem becomes silent when used in Thai, where there cannot be hard consonants at word endings (hence the Thais having often big problems speaking them well in English, especially in surnames).

 

You can see that it has a Mái Thanthakhâat on top of the last consonant, silencing it (the little whorl over the consonant).

 

Therefore, while Thais do not speak this silent consonant, the romanized spelling is still correct.

 

A little history lesson at the end: maybe interestingly (or not, when I count the downvotes on my last posts), as Sak Yant are a tradition coming from Borān Kammaṭṭhāna (Esoteric Theravada) mainly transmitted from Cambodia before the reforms of King Mongkut, the alphabet used in the tattoos is Khorm, a historic form of the Khmer alphabet.

 

I have also seen -- although very rarely -- Sak Yant using Ari/Mon letters, another form of Theravada mainly transmitted from Burma that transported esoteric knowledge in historic times (for example, this is the specific source of Naga worship you see in many Thai temples nowadays, especially in the Northeast).

 

Either way, most of those traditions have vanished or are just relics from a thriving lived tradition that connected the whole of Southeast Asia including Indonesia that fractured with Islamization and Western colonization and finally ended in the mid-1800s due to the religious reforms of King Mongkut, wo moved his royal patronage from Borān Kammaṭṭhāna to a traditionalist Theravada tradition he had re-imported from Sri Lanka (giving the monarchy the absolute control over the Sangha in the process that it enjoys to this day).

 

For those indeed more interested, my text contains all the right terms to research it deeper. On top of that, there are really fascinating scholarly books out there from just the last decade alone, as only now many historic documents from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Burma have come into the attention of Western scholars.

 

One I can recommend due to my own reading: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55495131-esoteric-theravada