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Ontology · research corpus

Tattoo concept
library.

364 researched concepts and 505 relationships — motifs, symbols, placements, styles and the ideas that connect them. Read the honesty panel below before you trust any single entry.

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By concept type.

Read this first

What the corpus is — and is not.

Research in progress

How to read this corpus

This is research in progress, not a reference work. 305 of 364 concepts (84%) are thinly supported, and nothing in it has been reviewed by a tattoo artist or validated — the validation-records table holds 0 rows. Every concept carries its evidence marker so you can tell the difference. The design studio's concept step can draw style and placement wording from this corpus; being used there does not make an entry reviewed.

Attested58 · 16%

at least 2 resolved research sources AND at least 1 relationship that was independently asserted rather than promoted from another row

Thin305 · 84%

fewer than 2 resolved research sources, or no independently asserted relationship

Unsupported1 · 0%

no resolved research source and no independently asserted relationship

Concepts364
Relationships505
132 independently asserted · 373 promoted (74%). A promoted edge restates a value already present in another corpus row; it is not an independent attestation. Each such edge says so in its own notes field and carries promoted=true.
Research sources127
Aliases43
Enrichment rows286
One payload per concept for the types that have a seed table; symbols have none.
Cultural review44
44 concepts make claims about a community's practice nobody qualified has confirmed; they carry a warning on their own page.
Empty tables3
prompt_tokens (corpus rows), validation_records, tattooability_rules — shipped with zero rows. prompt_tokens holds 20 rows, 0 from the corpus; the rest were seeded from code (vibe:tools.py@a11ed95).
Unmapped style keys4
japanese, tribal, chicano, sticker — keys in the seeded style directives (prompt_tokens) that no concept in this corpus names.
Integrity findings0
Dangling references reported by hct_v_ontology_integrity. Zero is the healthy state.

Declared in the schema but unpopulated in this corpus: anatomy, culture, terminology.

Ontology 0.2 · schema 0.2 · dataset 0.1 · corpus a11ed95 · imported 2026-09-27