The Pintaflores Festival, a festivity that combines the beauty of flowers and the masculine-likeness of tattoos, has been a less-visited but visually-appealing festival in the Negros Island.
The festival is a confluence of a famous festival in San Carlos City: the Nabingkalan Tattoo Festival, and its highlight, the Dances of Flowers. From the two concepts, Pintaflores officially became the city's official festival in 1992.
The dances are dramas of life and death and the triumph of good against evil. These themes are thanksgiving praises to the city's patron saint, San Carlos Borromeo.
Dancers with colorful flowers drawn artistically over faces, arms, bodies, and legs and dressed in ethnic-styled ensembles perform a dance ritual that usually shows a human flower formation.
"Pintaflores is coined from the words Pintados, the concept behind the Nabingkalan Tattoo Festival, and the "flores", the Spanish word for flowers that dominated the theme of the Dances of Flowers," the site stated.
Tattoos are believed to have been sketched on the skin of locals in pre-colonial Visayas--and its tribal allure has since been the core subject of the festival in San Carlos.
