Istalif potters cook their glaze from ishkar — the ash of a salt-plant — with crushed quartz, copper oxide and sunflower seed, then flood it over a white Ghorband slip. The pattern is not painted. It is cut through the coat with a compass and a needle, so the drawing reads as depth: dark where the glaze pools in the incision, pale where it thins over the slip.

This system treats the glaze as the ground. Fields drift in tone, edges pool darker, rules are cuts rather than lines, and every ornament is struck from a fixed centre and a fixed radius.