Thailand’s sacred tattoos are a visual feast. The ancient Khmer writing system used for the magic spells looks like a language from a lost world and stretches from the lucid to the illegible, from the poetic into the anarchic.

On backs and chests it looks like text, the instructions mysterious and obscure. On hands, legs and throats it’s all abstract, trippy and brutally crude. Yet there is more to this than the written word. It goes deeper.

The sak yant devotees come in reverence and the monks and tattoo masters etch images of archaic sacred pillars and fearsome animals onto their skins. The Indian monkey god Hanuman makes an appearance, as do tigers, dragons, birds, snakes, lizards, hermits and eels.

Indian mythology, Buddhism, Brahmanism, animism and common superstition make for a colorful hotchpotch of religious ideas embedded into skin, which may challenge the more formalised approach to celebrating the spiritual life and occasionally enrages Buddhist conservatives.

But the world of the sak yant exists through such a bizarre clash of circumstances, of faith and history, of order and chaos, of seekers and charlatans, of humility and machismo, that it has a life all of its own and is unlikely to fade any time soon.