The Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam, holds a group of batik textiles that include book covers, a tea cosy, a handkerchief and head wraps. Matched to strikingly similar batik textiles held in the Smithsonian Institute collection, these items can be attributed to the prison labor of women during Dutch colonial rule of the Indonesian island of Java in the early decades of the twentieth century. By uncovering the circumstances of the labor which made these particular textiles it has been possible to recover evidence of incarcerated women’s sharing of textile knowledge acquired before incarceration, recognize that even from the perspective of the Dutch colonial government at least one carceral batik workshop was not solely a venture in profit-making, and trace acknowledgement both by colonial officials and the women incarcerated of the not-to-be-underestimated skills necessary to produce batik.