Downstairs: a vintage Fiat, a vintage Austin Mini, a few Mercedes. Upstairs: a wild museum of spiritual imagery, Brahmin, Buddhism, animism -- tall effigies of leopard-striped hermits and beautiful Buddha statues, talismanic scrolls of occult origins and prints of Khmer calligraphy.
This strange place is what it is: a tattoo parlour, perhaps the most successful in the country, though the aura of man-made spirituality has somewhat elevated it, in the mind of believers, to the status of a shrine. In white dress, Sompong Kanpai, better known as Noo Kanpai, sits cross-legged on a raised platform as he pierces the bare back of a man with a long needle of his renown (he changes it every time). Lips moving in tiny fractions, he mumbles prayers and blessings. Then he sprinkles the man's back with holy water.
A sorcerer? A holy man? Or just a tattooist?
"I'm a gangster," says Noo laughing. He doesn't mean he is a gangster -- or not anymore -- but that he has the gangster's spirit defined by courage and indomitability, something he has never cast off from his stormy adolescence. "I don't harm others, and I refuse to tattoo those who come here to seek power, love potions or black magic. That's repulsive! I give people khun phra (the good of Buddha), that's different."
It's been 13 years since Noo Kanpai made headlines around the world for inking Angelina Jolie's shoulder blade with his famous yant ha taew -- the five-row tattoo pattern of Khmer hieroglyphics, a set of ancient symbols doubled as modernist body art said to possess the power of luck, charm and protection, depending on who you ask. He also gave Jolie the blue-green half-turning tiger on the lower part of her back. This January, it was reported that Noo was flown in to Siem Riep, where Jolie was shooting her Khmer Rouge film, to add new markings on the actress's back, as well as on Brad Pitt's. Tabloid pictures of Jolie with her new tattoos made the rounds in February, and suddenly Noo's name is back on the circuit.
Noo Kanpai’s tattoo parlour in Pathum Thani. He has 20 to 30 customers a day, half from abroad.
"Let's not talk about it, I agreed with them that I wouldn't talk about it to the press," says Noo, smiling and laughing all the way. "Did they fly me to Cambodia? They should answer that, not me. Well, let's talk about something else."
Perhaps more than any other tattooist in the past few decades, Noo has salvaged tattooing, unintentionally, from its traditional stigma and put it in the zone of holy fashion, a kind of sexy danger -- and it was the Jolie job that sealed it. At his shop, photographs of celebrity clients cover entire walls, featuring leading Thai soap stars (from Chompoo Araya to Woody Militajinda), athletes, aristocrats, businessmen and military people (curiously, he also displays his tax registration on the same wall). Of course there's Angelina Jolie, and also Michelle Rodriguez (from Fast And Furious). Noo says he doesn't follow the entertainment world, and he usually has no idea if his client is a famous personality. He doesn't care, he claims, as long as the person comes in good faith -- and sober. Once a popular Thai TV actor arrived stinking of booze, and Noo refused to ink him.
"You have to be good or the tattoo is meaningless," he says. "They have to believe in Buddha's teachings. Come here, get a tattoo, go home and eat vegetarian for three days, and never seek to harm others, and you'll be fine."
The typical mix of crypto-Buddhism and pure superstition is what has given tattoos a bad vibe for centuries, all the more so now in the age when the meaning of Buddhism is debated by various sects and practitioners. Noo is in the grey zone and he's unapologetic -- he reminds us that he is not a monk but a layperson, and his mantra is a concoction of old Khmer scriptures he learned from his grandfather and an interpretation of Lord Buddha's dhamma, a claim that always raises eyebrows. But if a monk can publicly bless an angel child (luk thep doll) with dead people's bones and things like that, Noo says, how can he be wrong when he merely chants hymns to his "disciples"?
Noo's shop is in Pathum Thani, though he originally came from Nonthaburi. As a teenager, he worked as a guard at a local bus depot, a contested ground of gang rivalry and violence. There was always a fight involving knives or guns, and that was when he began to look for supernatural protection. His grandfather, he says, knew Khmer chanting, and he learned it from him. He sought out amulets and talismanic objects that promised invulnerability, and seeing that a lot of monks had tattoos, he got himself some too. Soon Noo became well-known among the local hotheads of Nonthaburi as someone who would emerge from a brawl unscathed. Noo said he actively looked for danger to test the power of his amulets and always survived it -- a familiar claim of every amulet guru.
Ordained briefly as a monk, he taught himself to tattoo. "I used thin coconut-palm twigs from a broom to tattoo friends who believed it would help protect them."
And the desire to be protected by magic, sorcery, voodooism, or whatever one might call it, proved not just a Thai thing but an Asian one. When Noo left monkhood and turned full-time guru tattooist, he quickly attracted an international clientele. In the 1980s, in a move that showed his business acumen, he would stay for half-a-month in Thailand and the other half in Singapore, Malaysia (Johor Baru) and Hong Kong, where he rented a room to tattoo Chinese clients who believed in the power of his symbols. Noo recalls that in those countries, "there was a lot of fighting between gangs too, and they needed all the help they could get".
The famous ha taew tattoo marked by a long needle.
With a note of self-deprecation (actually there's a note of self-deprecation in most things he says), Noo says he realised that his tattoos were creating a lot of trouble in society, because every gangster wanted his markings so they could get out and fight like there's no tomorrow, unharmed.
"So I stopped doing that and turned to do tattoos that brought luck and blessings," he says. That was around the time he came up with the popular yant ha taew, a vertical row of calligraphic symbols that he claims to be a coded message of Buddha's words. He also stopped travelling to foreign countries -- now people from China, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and elsewhere are willing to come to him.
Today Noo, who's in his mid-50s, has his two sons helping with the tattooing. Each day they receive over 20 clients -- actually, they prefer the term luk sit, meaning disciples or students -- with Noo himself doing a maximum of around 10. The taste of magic or exotica still runs strong, and the international clients make up 50% of his business, including celebrities in the Chinese-speaking world.
In his jokey tone, Noo says there's no prerequisite for those who want his tattoos, only that the person "must not stink and take a shower first, please". Since he's not a monk, he can tattoo women, though he insists that he won't receive anyone under 15. Each tattooing session lasts fewer than 30 minutes, with his nimble hand working the long needle on bare flesh in a steady rhythm of someone who's been doing this for over 30 years.
So how much does it cost to get his tattoo?
"I've been waiting for you to ask me that! This is a decent, taxpaying operation!" he exclaims and smiles. Noo has a way of answering questions that is at once "yes" and "no", at once evasive and boastful. "I never ask for any specific amount from my customer. For businessmen, they're willing to give more than I thought I could ask. Say I think 50,000 baht, they would give me 500,000. But in general, it's 4,000 or 5,000 to 10,000 baht. But if you don't have any money, tell me and I would do it for free."
The maximum he ever got -- again he says this with a laugh that's hard to tell if he's bluffing or being serious -- is one million. "But 1 million baht or $1 million? I can't say, I can't remember," he winks. "Think about it, do you think Angelina Jolie would give me just 50,000 or 100,000 baht?"
The classic Fiat downstairs belongs to Noo's collection of vintage vehicles -- the Austin Mini too, though Noo laughs and doesn't confirm if the Mercedes are his. "I like old cars, they are more beautiful than modern ones." As he's talking a customer walks in, while one of Noo's sons is busy inking another. There is also an off-duty soldier in the room; as a "disciple" with his back full of tattoos, he hangs around his master whenever he can. He goes to temples too, the soldier says, but it gives him peace to come here.
Soon another woman arrives -- a middle-aged Thai soap star who's also a loyal disciple -- and together Noo and his staff sit around having lunch with her on a low table set out on the floor. Around them, the Ganesh god stares out, the cartoonish hermits loom over them, the rows of Buddha statues behind Noo gleam with a holy aura. It's just another day at this enterprise, a tattoo parlour where the business of spirituality is as brisk as ever.
