Wielding a cumbersome tattoo gun with his small hands swamped in surgical gloves, nine-year-old Napat Mitmakorn expertly inks the pattern of a fanged serpent on a man’s upper thigh.
“I want to be a tattoo artist and open my own tattoo parlor,” he said at his booth at a Bangkok tattoo expo, where fascinated attendees paused to film his work. “I like art so I like to tattoo.”
Tattooing is a centuries-old tradition in Thailand, where tattoo parlors are omnipresent and offer designs ranging from the ancient and spiritual to the modern and profane.
Photo: AFP
Napat’s father, Nattawut Sangtong, said he introduced his son — who goes by the nickname “Knight” — to the craft of tattooing to avoid the pitfalls of contemporary childhood.
“I just wanted to keep him away from his phone, because he was addicted to gaming and had a short attention span,” said the 38-year-old, also an amateur tattooist, who works at a block printing factory.
The father-son duo together learned from TikTok tutorials and practiced on paper before graduating to artificial leather simulating human skin, and then the real thing.
Photo: AFP
Knight said he swiftly picked up the skills, because art is his favorite school subject.
Recognizing his son’s talent, Nattawut now coaches him in two-hour sessions three days a week.
“It’s not just tattooing, it’s like meditation,” Nattawut said.
The pair run a TikTok channel together — “The Tattoo Artist with Milk Teeth” — where they livestream Knight’s sessions and sometimes draw hundreds of thousands of viewers with a single clip.
His Saturday session at the Thailand Tattoo Expo was his public debut, as he tattooed his uncle for a second time — marking him with a 20cm mythical Naga serpent.
Unfazed by the techno music blaring from massive speakers, Knight predicts the creature from Hindu and Thai folklore would take 12 hours to complete.
For now, his father insists he only works on family and friends — opening up to public clients would require more rigorous hygiene training.
However, Naruebet Chonlatachaisit, Knight’s uncle, is relaxed as the tattoo takes shape on his left leg.
“I trust him, and I think he’ll only improve,” he said.
Knight was one of nearly 200 artists at the Thailand Tattoo Expo — but drew outsized attention among the crowds of thousands of visitors this weekend.
Office worker Napat Muangsawang stopped by the boy’s booth to admire his meticulous artistry.
“It’s quite amazing. Tattooing isn’t easy,” he said. “It’s not like drawing on a paper where you can just erase it.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS