Archive Note
She works the Butbut Kalinga batok tradition, which historically marked Kalinga warriors who had taken a head and Kalinga women as a coming-of-age and clan-identity practice; her toolkit is a citrus thorn lashed to a bamboo stick, the gisi, struck by a tapping stick, the pat-ik, driving pine-soot pigment into the body. She was trained from about age fifteen by her father, a Butbut mambabatok, around 1932. For most of her working life she tattooed within her own community; the end of headhunting under American rule drained the warrior client pool and the tradition contracted toward the women's-marking line. International attention began with Lars Krutak's 2007 fieldwork and the 2009 Discovery Channel Tattoo Hunter episode, and peaked with the April 2023 Vogue Philippines cover, on which she appeared at age 106, the oldest cover model in the magazine's history at the time. Her hands-on successors are her grandnieces Grace Palicas and Elyang Wigan, alongside a wider next-generation Buscalan cohort.