Batok is hand-tapped tattooing among the Butbut Kalinga of the Cordillera. The name is the sound of the work: a citrus thorn set in a bamboo stick, struck through the skin by a second stick, ink scraped as soot from the underside of a cooking pot. One pigment, no colour.

The design system follows that constraint literally. Skin is the page — a mid-dark brown that never lightens to paper. Every mark is built from discrete taps: rows of short dashes, stacked chevrons, zigzag bands that run along an edge and taper with it. Colour appears only where woven tapis cloth appears, and carries the meanings the weavers give it.