There are many ways to save something. One can document it, place it in a museum, capture it on camera, or simply write about it.

When Moranngam Khaling began to worry about the ancient but fading tattoo traditions of north-east India, none of these approaches seemed ideal. He wanted, he says, to help it sprout back to life.

That’s how the 40-year-old ended up creating a “tattoo garden”.

“In our culture, every element that goes into a tattoo was once a living thing. It’s a nature-to-nature transfer,” he says.

So, on a four-acre plot in Khoibu village, Manipur, his tattoo garden holds 25 types of plants, representing the raw materials used across 10 tribes.

In addition, there are photos and explanations of patterns; across Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura, hand-tapped dots and stripes serve as markers of identity, age, class, marital status, or even how many rivals a brave warrior has killed in battle.

“The plants aren’t difficult to grow because they are native to the land,” he says.

What has been difficult is gathering the information on what different tribes use, and what some of the rarer patterns mean. Khaling has spent 12 years travelling sporadically through villages across the three states, for this purpose, photographing patterns and jotting down details.

“With fewer and fewer elders alive, the transfer of knowledge becomes difficult,” he says.

It all began for Khaling with a reawakening of his own. He was studying at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in Hyderabad in 2008 when he came upon an image of a traditional Uipo tattoo.

Khaling is one of only 2,000 remaining members of the Uipo aka Khoibu tribe.

The more he explored the tattoos of his tribe, the more intrigued he became. He had spent much of his childhood with relatives in Delhi, sent away by his parents as many children are, to keep them away from Manipur’s strife, with its blockades and sectarian conflict.

He was now 24 years old, and still this was all new to him.

It struck him at this point that this once-vital aspect of his community’s identity was endangered. Younger people weren’t opting for the traditional patterns, which typically cover parts of the face, chest, neck, arms and legs.

Others, like him, were growing up with no knowledge of these patterns at all.

He became determined to preserve what he could of the ancient art form.

In 2009, he graduated from NIFT, Hyderabad and moved to Delhi to open his first tattoo studio. In 2012, he decided to move the tattoo studio to Manipur, and carry on his research alongside. He shuttled between Delhi and Manipur in this manner, until 2019, when he returned home for good.

Since then, he has worked to set up the tattoo garden and knowledge repository on his four acres, part of which was a gift from a cousin and part an endowment from Khoibu village. Amid the ongoing troubles, he hasn’t opened the garden to the public. It will eventually be open to visitors by appointment, he says.

Khaling hopes to expand beyond tattoos too, turning the plot into a sort of tribal art and design centre. “I want to work with craftsmen on bamboo and cane furniture, traditional textiles and handloom. I plan to make this a place with intent,” he says.

Meanwhile, his efforts at documentation, and the tattoo patterns he has helped preserve, have drawn attention. They have been exhibited at the Humboldt Forum museum in Berlin and the Museum of Vancouver in Canada, among others. He has been featured in tattoo anthropologist Lars Krutak’s The World Atlas of Tattoo (Yale University Press; 2015) and will feature in Krutak’s upcoming Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink (Princeton University Press; 2025). “I have been studying his work since 2013,” says Krutak.

Khaling, for his part, is proud of his work, but doesn’t think it extraordinary.

In his own family, he says, his father Mosyel Syelsaangthyel Khaling, a respected native linguist, has toiled for decades on a dictionary of the Uipo language. His brothers, one a teacher and the other a social worker, live lives rooted in the community.

Many in his tribe are working in their own ways, he adds, to preserve what they can of a heritage that is fading.