Wielding a cumbersome tattoo gun with his small hands swamped in surgical gloves, nine-year-old Napat Mitmakorn expertly inks the pattern of a fanged serpent on a man’s upper thigh.
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“I want to be a tattoo artist and open my own tattoo parlour,” he says in his booth at a Bangkok tattoo expo, where fascinated attendees paused to film his work. “I like art so I like to tattoo.”
Tattooing is a centuries-old tradition in Thailand, where tattoo parlours are omnipresent and offer designs ranging from the ancient and spiritual to the modern and profane.
Napat’s father, Nattawut Sangtong, said he introduced his son – who goes by the nickname “Knight” – to the craft of tattooing to swerve the pitfalls of contemporary childhood.
“I just wanted to keep him away from his phone because he was addicted to gaming and had a short attention span,” said the 38-year-old, also an amateur tattooist, who works at a block printing factory.
The father-son duo together learned from TikTok tutorials and practised on paper before graduating to artificial leather simulating human skin, and then the real thing.
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