### q7 Inuit tattooists were female elders > The inventory of Inuit tracery comprised lines, chevrons, squares, dots, arrowheads, triangles… It had its own vocabulary: quajaq (forehead lines), tunit (cheek lines), and tablerutit (chin lines). The practitioners were almost exclusively respected older women who drew on their experience as expert seamstresses. In “skin-stitching,” they followed each pass of a needle of copper or caribou bone with a greased wood sliver dipped in lamp-black or soot from a kettle’s bottom, to insert the pigment. For “hand-poking,” they pricked a hole in the skin with a needle fixed to a handle and immediately applied soot stirred in blubber to the wound, with a second needle or stick held in the same hand at the same time. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01fmsj8zcw3ywzygcm11wb0yf8) - [[Marks of Belonging by ABOVE&BEYOND#q7 Inuit tattooists were female elders|View in Vault]]