The bungai terung, the eggplant flower, is the first tattoo a young Iban man of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo received before his bejalai, the journey of knowledge that took him from his longhouse out into the world. It is worn as a paired rosette on the front of both shoulders, set exactly where the strap of a carrying pack rests, a visible promise to bear the weight of one's own life. At the center of each flower is a tight spiral, the tali nyawa, the rope of life, drawn from the underside of a tadpole and read as the beginning of a new life. This is a sacred rite-of-passage mark belonging to a specific people, made by a hand-tap method within an animist cosmology, not a design from a menu. The practice was disrupted across the twentieth century by colonial suppression and Christian missionization, and it has been visibly revived since around 2000 by Iban practitioners. This page treats the bungai terung as respectful history and cultural education. It belongs to the Iban, and that is where its meaning lives.

What is the bungai terung tattoo?

The bungai terung is the paired shoulder rosette an Iban man traditionally received before his first bejalai, the journey of knowledge that carried a young man away from his longhouse to gain skill, wealth, and standing in the wider world. The name is the Iban and Malay term for the eggplant flower, bunga meaning flower and terung meaning eggplant or brinjal. The motif is built around a central spiral, the tali nyawa or rope of life, surrounded by the petals of the flower. It is worn on the front of both shoulders, where the strap of a carrying pack would sit, so the placement itself carries the meaning: the wearer is ready to bear the weight of his own world. The bungai terung is at once a coming-of-age marker and a piece of spiritual armor for the road ahead. It is one of the most recognizable Indigenous tattoo motifs of the Pacific rim. The Atlas treats it as cultural history rather than as a design to be selected, because for the Iban it was never decoration.

Who traditionally wears the bungai terung?

The bungai terung belongs to the Iban, formerly called the Sea Dayak, the largest Indigenous group in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, with related communities across the border in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Within Iban tradition it is a men's mark, received by a young man at the threshold of his first bejalai. The Iban are one of several distinct Bornean peoples long grouped under the colonial umbrella word Dayak, a label that flattens real differences between the Iban men's biographical tradition and the Kayan and Kenyah women's class-stratified tradition of the upriver interior. The bungai terung specifically is Iban. Naming the people correctly is part of treating the tradition with respect, and the Atlas does not blur the Iban, Kayan, and Kenyah into a single "tribal" idiom.

What does the bungai terung mean?

The bungai terung carries several layered meanings at once. It marks the transition from boyhood toward manhood and the readiness to take on responsibility within the community. It is bound to the bejalai, the journey of knowledge, and serves as spiritual protection for the traveler facing unfamiliar places and unfamiliar spirits. Its central spiral, the tali nyawa, names the rope of life and the start of a new life, drawn iconographically from the underside of a tadpole, an image of metamorphosis and new beginnings. In the longer biographical logic of Iban tattooing, the bungai terung also functions as the opening mark of a life record: subsequent tattoos a man received on his travels recorded where he had been and what he had done, so that his skin became a visual account of his journeys. These meanings are well documented across multiple sources and are reliable in their general outline.

What is the tali nyawa spiral?

The tali nyawa is the spiral at the center of each bungai terung flower. The name translates as the rope of life, and the design is read as the rope or thread of a person's life force and the beginning of a new life as an adult. Its form is taken from the underside of a tadpole, and the connection to the frog's life cycle is deliberate: the tadpole's transformation mirrors the Iban understanding of a young man's coming of age as he leaves the longhouse for the first time. The spiral can be rendered turning in either direction, and in the traditional paired arrangement the two spirals are mirrored across the body to hold physical and spiritual balance. The tadpole-spiral reading is anchored in the academic field study by Ahmad Faisal and colleagues, who worked with Iban men in Julau in Sarawak and in the Sungai Utik and Sungai Sadap communities of West Kalimantan, and it is corroborated in Lars Krutak's ethnographic synthesis. It is among the best-documented readings on this page.

How was the bungai terung traditionally made?

The bungai terung was made by hand-tapping, the technique shared across the Bornean traditions and across the wider Pacific-rim hand-tap family. A cluster of needles, historically of bone, thorn, or bamboo and today of metal, is lashed at a right angle to the end of a wooden staff called the jarum. The artist dips the cluster in pigment, positions it against the skin, and taps the staff rhythmically with a small mallet called the pangut held in the other hand, while a second person stretches the skin taut. The pigment was historically soot mixed with sugarcane juice or another binder, and today is commercial tattoo ink. The method produces the dense, crisp, stippled lines characteristic of Bornean work. The tattoo master was not a decorator but a holder of accumulated spiritual relationships, mediating between the wearer and the protective spirits associated with each motif. The technique is recognizably continuous with the pre-contact tradition, though the framing sometimes seen in tourism material that it is literally unchanged is a mild folklorism, since the materials and the studio setting have shifted.

Is it appropriation to get a bungai terung tattoo?

Yes, for an outsider to take the bungai terung as a personal design is appropriation, and the Atlas does not present it as something to get. The bungai terung is a sacred rite-of-passage mark tied to Iban identity, to the bejalai journey, and to an animist cosmology in which the design carries spiritual force and protection. It was traditionally earned at a specific life threshold and worn in a specific paired placement for specific reasons. To copy it as ornament, without the people, the journey, or the meaning behind it, reduces a living and ancestral tradition to a generic "tribal" graphic. Within Iban understanding, even the placement matters: the design belongs in a mirrored pair on the shoulders, and treating it as a free-floating decoration strips out its balance and purpose. The honest and respectful response is to learn the history, to name the Iban as its originators, and to recognize that wearing it is not the outsider's to claim. Where the design is made today, it is most appropriately made by and for Iban people, by practitioners working within or in genuine consultation with that tradition.

The Iban world and the bejalai journey

The Iban are riverine longhouse people, traditionally living along the Rajang, Saribas, and Skrang river systems of Sarawak and organized around swidden rice agriculture and parallel prestige economies: textile weaving among women and journeying and, historically, headhunting among men. Their religion was an animism in which spirits, antu, filled the natural world and intervened constantly in human affairs. Within this world tattooing was a sacred act mediated by spirit relations. As Lars Krutak records in his ethnographic synthesis, Iban cosmology holds that all life, whether animal, vegetable, or human, carries a spiritual aspect, and the same spirits that grant the skills of weaving and rice cultivation grant the skill of tattooing. A tattoo was at once a biographical record, armor against malevolent spirits, and, in the eschatology documented by both the early ethnographers and by Krutak, a torch lighting the wearer's path through darkness in the afterlife.

The bejalai is the Iban institution at the heart of the bungai terung. The word means, roughly, to walk, and it names the journey a young man undertook when he left his longhouse to find knowledge, prove himself, and return with wealth and standing. The bungai terung was the mark of departure, given before the journey began. Its placement on the front of the shoulders is functional as well as symbolic, since it sits where the strap of a carrying pack rests, so the design announces a readiness to carry one's own burdens into the world. As the traveler moved from place to place, he could receive further tattoos in the regional styles of where he went, so that over a lifetime his body recorded the geography of his journeys. The bungai terung opened that record.

The bungai terung and the petals

A claim circulates widely that the flower "traditionally features eight petals." That specific claim does not hold up against the broader record. The field and reference sources document the petal count as variable, commonly ranging from roughly four to nine depending on the size and the rendering of the tattoo rather than fixed at eight, so the Atlas reports that the petal count varies. A related popular reading, that the petals represent "eight directions of the compass," appears only in modern interpretive sources and is best understood as a later overlay rather than a documented traditional meaning. The traditional reading of the flower itself is botanical, the blossom of the eggplant, a plant long present in Borneo, and the petals are most often described as signaling strength, growth, and the natural world surrounding the central spiral of life. The load-bearing meaning of the motif sits in the tali nyawa at the center and in the bejalai context, not in a fixed petal arithmetic.

A wider Iban repertoire

The bungai terung was the first mark in a much larger Iban design vocabulary, and understanding that vocabulary guards against reading the eggplant flower as a stand-alone ornament. Iban men's tattooing also included forearm and wrist work with stylized scorpions, dogs, and dragons, throat-zone designs, and chest and back panels whose scroll and interlock motifs are stylistically related to the pua kumbu textiles woven by Iban women. The most restrictively earned marks belonged to the headhunting register. Tegulun, small finger tattoos, recorded a warrior's achievements in ngayau, the headhunting expedition that was the central male prestige institution of pre-suppression Iban society, built on the belief that the head held the soul and that taking an enemy's head transferred its power. Throat tattoos called pantang rekong were believed to strengthen the skin against decapitation. This headhunting register is historical. The contemporary revival treats ngayau and the tegulun as heritage rather than literal practice, and the tegulun is recognized but no longer awarded, the one major Iban prestige design not revived in its literal sense after colonial law extinguished the practice it recorded.

Suppression and revival

The prestige logic that gave Iban tattooing much of its meaning was disrupted by external power. The Brooke Rajah dynasty, Sarawak's so-called White Rajahs who ruled from 1841, progressively outlawed ngayau through the later nineteenth century with successive campaigns against headhunting expeditions, and British colonial administration formalized the prohibition after the Second World War. A historical complication sits inside that prohibition: during the Malayan Emergency of 1948 to 1960, British counterinsurgency forces recruited Iban trackers, and some were tattooed for kills made on those operations, the last episodes in which the headhunting mark was given in a living register. Across the twentieth century, urbanization, modern education, and the spread of Christianity drew the practice down, though it survived in remoter longhouses.

From roughly 2000 onward, Iban tattooing has undergone a self-conscious urban revival anchored by a small group of Iban practitioners. Ernesto Kalum, born Iban in Sibu, Sarawak, opened the Borneo Headhunters studio in Kuching after training abroad and a period of research with Iban elders to recover the traditional motif vocabulary, and he organized the first International Borneo Tattoo Convention at the Sarawak Cultural Village in May 2002, with a second convention in 2007. Eddie David, also Iban from Sarawak, established the Borneo Ink studio in Kuala Lumpur and pivoted it toward Iban-tribal specialization after his own return to longhouse elders to research the meaning of the motifs his clients were requesting. On the Indonesian side, Herpianto Hendra, with family origins in the Kapuas Hulu regency of West Kalimantan, is the principal parallel figure. The revival is real and visible, and the headhunting register within it is treated as historical rather than literal.

Two further notes on the record. The often-quoted figure that 70 to 80 percent of young urban Iban in Sarawak cities now wear at least one traditional design is a practitioner-side estimate reported in regional journalism, not census or survey data, and the Atlas carries it as a rough indication rather than a hard figure. The founding date of the Borneo Ink studio is unsettled in the underlying record, with sources placing it variously in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, most plausibly because a single year has at times conflated Eddie David's personal start in tattooing with the later founding of the Kuala Lumpur studio. The Atlas reports the revival as anchored by named Iban practitioners from around 2000 and does not assert a single contested studio-founding year.

The bungai terung belongs to the western end of the Pacific-rim hand-tap family, the broad group of Indigenous traditions that share a tapped-needle technique and a deep cultural embedding of the practice. Within Borneo itself, the Iban men's biographical tradition that produced the bungai terung sits alongside the Kayan and Kenyah women's tradition of the upriver interior, in which female specialists of hereditary office tattooed class-stratified designs using a carved wooden stencil, a contrast the colonial label Dayak obscures. Further afield, the same tapped technique connects the Bornean traditions to the Filipino batok of the Cordillera and to Polynesian tatau, each a distinct people's practice with its own meanings, practitioners, and histories of suppression and revival. These are cousins in method and in cultural weight, not interchangeable styles. For the fuller history of the Iban, Kayan, and Kenyah traditions together, see the Atlas entry on Borneo tattooing.

Why this is cultural education, not a design idea

The Atlas documents the bungai terung as history because that is what respect for a sacred, closed tradition requires. The motif has been widely copied in commercial tattoo shops around the world, often detached from the bejalai context, from the Iban lineage, and from the paired shoulder placement that holds its meaning. Researchers and Iban practitioners alike have noted that this copying flattens a specific and living tradition into a generic graphic. The point of this page is the opposite: to name the Iban as the originators, to set down what the design means and to whom it belongs, to credit the hand-tap method and the practitioners reviving it, and to be clear that outsiders taking the mark as personal ornament is appropriation. The honest practice, for anyone who finds the bungai terung beautiful, is to learn the history and to leave the wearing of it to the people whose life it records.

Sources

  • Hose, Charles, and William McDougall. The Pagan Tribes of Borneo. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1912. The principal pre-suppression ethnographic and photographic record of Iban, Kayan, and Kenyah tattoo practice. Available digitally via Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.
  • Krutak, Lars. "In the Realm of Spirits: Traditional Dayak Tattoo in Borneo." larskrutak.com. The principal English-language synthetic ethnography of contemporary Bornean tattooing, based on first-hand fieldwork.
  • Krutak, Lars. "Torches for the Afterlife: Women Tattoo Artists of Northern Borneo." larskrutak.com. The afterlife-eschatology framing across the Bornean cluster.
  • Faisal, Ahmad, et al. "The Significance of Bunga Terung Tattoo for the Iban Men in Julau, Sarawak and Putussibau, Indonesia" and the related "Deconstruction of the Traditional Bunga Terung Tattoo and the Sequence of Its Application Among Iban Men." Academic field study anchoring the tadpole-spiral reading of the tali nyawa across the Sarawak and Kalimantan border.
  • Sarawak Tourism Board. "The Fascinating Stories Behind Sarawakian Tribal Tattoos." Institutional Sarawak-side overview.
  • Inkers Tattoo Magazine. "Ernesto Kalum, pur et dur, Borneo Headhunters." Profile covering Kalum and the 2002 and 2007 International Borneo Tattoo Conventions.
  • Borneo Post Online. "Ernesto keeps Iban traditional tattoo alive" (2010) and "Reclaiming one's culture on skin" (2023). Sarawak-side reporting on the urban revival and adoption estimates.

Editorial

Researched and written by John J. Mayo III, Editor, Tattoo History Atlas. This page reflects current canon as of the Last reviewed date above and is refreshed on a quarterly cycle. It draws on Tattoo Archive (Winston-Salem) holdings on Iban tattooing and on Kayan and Kenyah tattooing, and follows the sourcing discipline of treating sacred and closed traditions as cultural history and not drawing Iban ethnography from Western design-portfolio material.

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