Older Punjabi women, in both Punjabs, carry tattoos: dots, lines, small motifs on the hands, forearms, chin and neck, applied in youth with a needle and soot or indigo.
The designs are traditional and repeat: geometric patterns, sun and flower forms, sometimes a name or a set of initials.
They were applied by women of specific communities who travelled between villages, and the practice was general across Punjab regardless of religion.
It stopped, largely, in the middle of the twentieth century, and the women who carry them are now in their seventies and above.
The designs have never been recorded systematically. Photographing the tattooed hands of fifty old women in one district and noting the motifs would take a week and produce a body of Punjabi design that exists nowhere in any collection.
In about ten years there will be nobody to photograph.
The ink was lamp black or indigo and the needle was a cluster of pins. It was done in the courtyard, usually before marriage, and a name or an initial was sometimes among the marks.
The motifs are shared across the region, and the same designs appear on women in Pakistani Punjab and on women whose families came across in 1947.
The practice ended with the generation born around the 1950s. There is no book of the designs and no photographic record beyond what has been taken incidentally.