I travelled to Ziro Valley in Arunachal Pradesh not knowing what I would find, but what stayed with me long after I left was not a landscape or a festival, it was a conversation. I was photographing an elderly Apatani woman, her face marked with dark tattoo lines running from her forehead to her chin, large wooden plugs stretching both sides of her nose, when I told her she looked beautiful. She smiled. And then the woman beside her laughed and said, "We look ugly."

That one sentence made me want to understand why these women look the way they do.

The Apatani are one of India's most remarkable indigenous communities, settled farmers who carved lush rice terraces into the valley floor of the Lower Subansiri district, living in quiet harmony with the land for centuries. The older women bear two distinct marks, Tippei, dark tattoo lines inked vertically from forehead to chin, and Yaping Hullo, large circular plugs made of hardened bamboo or cane or forest wood inserted into both sides of the nostrils. The legend, carried in the community's oral memory and passed woman to woman, says this: Apatani women were considered so beautiful that men from neighbouring tribes would raid their villages to abduct them. So the elders marked their women, stretched their noses, tattooed their faces, to make them less desirable to the outside world. They hid their beauty to keep them safe.

This series is my attempt to sit with them, look properly, and let their faces tell the story.