Wat Bang Phra Tattoo Festival, Thailand.

Annually on the first weekend of March, thousands of devotees converge at the Wat Bang Phra Tattoo Festival, which takes place fifty kilometres outside Bangkok. They gather to perform rituals centred around sacred Sak Yant tattoos, which are believed to contain spiritual powers that protect their wearers from harm.

Disciples come to the festival to have their skin inked with new tattoos – which are given to them by the monastery’s monks in the traditional style, using long, thin needles – or to recharge the power of the Sak Yant they already have.

During the main part of the festival, devotees sit in rows in the monastery grounds and wait for their tattoos to activate and recharge. People fall into trances in waves and become inhabited with the animals depicted in their tattoo. Those with monkey tattoos shriek, tigers roar and prowl, and snakes slither along the ground. When fully-entranced, the tattoo wearers run headlong through (or sometimes across) the crowd towards a statue of the Buddha. There they’re caught by volunteers who ring the statue’s base and help them out of their trances.

At the end of the festival the monks lead the devotees in prayer, blessing those gathered who have reinstated the power of their tattoos for another year.