106-Year-Old Tattoo Artist Becomes Oldest Person To Feature On A Vogue Cover
- Anu
- April 5, 2023
- Celebrity
- apo whang od, Apo Whang-Od Vogue’s Oldest Cover Star 106, filipino tattoo artist, mambabatok, vogue oldest cover star
- 0 Comments
- Apo Maria Whang-Od Becomes Vogue’s Oldest Cover Star At 106
- She is the last female mambabatok of her generation
A Filipino tattoo artist, Apo Maria Whang-Od has become the oldest person to ever get featured on the cover of Vogue.
Whang-Od, who turned 106 in February, unseats Judi Dench as the oldest-ever Vogue cover star. Dench was featured in British Vogue’s June 2020 at 85.
The magazine also praised the artist on Instagram for how her works symbolize the “strength and beauty of the Filipino spirit”.
The centenarian has been hand-tapping tattoos since she was 16. She began under her father’s mentorship, carrying on the Philippines’ thousand-year-old practice of “Batok,” according to Vogue.
Batok is a traditional tattooing art form that was used as a status symbol for the headhunters of Kalinga in its early days.
Starting her career at age 16 with her father as her mentor, Whang-Od was the only female mambabatok, a traditional Kalinga tattoo artist, of her time. A mambabatok is a tattoo artist from the Kalinga tribe, an ethnic group whose ancestral domain is in the Cordillera Mountain Range of the northern Philippines.
Whang-Od has been described as the “last mambabatok” and, according to an interview conducted by tattoo anthropologist Lars Krutak, learned the art from her father when she was a teenager.
15 years ago, she started working with thousands of customers from outside of the Cordillera Region.
View this post on Instagram
