The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga presents a series of portraits by Filipino photographer Jake Verzosa (born 1979) that lament and celebrate a dying tradition of tattooing in villages throughout the Cordillera mountains in the northern Philippines. For nearly 1,000 years the Kalinga women have proudly worn these lace-like patterns, or batok , on their skin as symbols of beauty, wealth, stature and fortitude. Applied as part of a painful ritual, the vivid tattoos—abstractions of motifs such as ferns, rice bundles, centipedes and flowing rivers—reflect a rite of passage and a bond with nature. Yet today this intricate form of self-adornment has largely been abandoned. Between 2009 and 2013, Verzosa traveled extensively to document the last generation of women with the batok . His pictures reveal the artistic designs and symbolic functions of the tattoos. Accompanying Verzosa’s portraits is an illustrated glossary of the tattoo types and their meanings.