Turn the fabric over. Look at the back side. On genuine hand block print, you will see colour on the reverse — the dye has penetrated through the cloth fibres because the block was pressed with manual force. The pattern is visible from the back, though less sharp than the front. On screen print, the dye sits on or near the surface of the fabric. The reverse side is either white or shows only a faint shadow of the pattern.

Run your finger across the reverse side of a block print cotton suit. You will feel slight texture where the dye sits in the weave. On screen print, the reverse feels essentially the same as plain fabric.

Look at the pattern repeat across the fabric. In genuine hand block print, the repeat is never perfectly aligned. The second print is slightly shifted from the first — maybe 1–3mm in any direction. These minute shifts are unavoidable when a human being lifts a block, repositions it, and presses again. After years of practice, a skilled artisan gets very consistent, but never machine-perfect.

Screen printing and digital printing produce mechanically identical repeats. Hold the fabric at arm's length and look down the pattern line — if every repeat aligns with ruler-straight precision, it was not hand blocked.

Find the boundary of a printed motif — the edge where the colour meets the background fabric. On genuine hand block print, this edge is slightly soft. The dye spreads fractionally as the block lifts, creating a gentle feathering effect. The motif boundary is defined but not razor-sharp. On a premium, well-made block print this softness is minimal; on a coarser fabric it is more visible.

Screen print has sharp, precise edges. Under a phone camera zoomed in, the motif boundary on screen print looks clean and mechanically defined. On block print, you will see slight colour spread at the edge. Neither is a flaw — they are different craft signatures.

Look across a stretch of printed fabric — not at one motif, but at the whole surface. On genuine hand block print, the ink density varies slightly from print to print. One repeat may be slightly lighter or darker than the adjacent one. This happens because the artisan inks the block, presses it, and the block has slightly less ink with each successive press before re-inking. It is a very subtle variation that you often need two or three repeats to notice.

Screen printing applies an even layer of dye across the full width of the fabric in one pass. The colour density is completely uniform across the fabric. Perfect uniformity is a machine's trait, not a craftsperson's.

In a multi-colour block print design, each colour is a separate block applied separately. The artisan applies the outline block first (Rekha), then the filler block (Datta) for each colour. Getting these layers to align perfectly by hand is not possible — so on genuine block print with two or more colours, you will see occasional slight misregistration where one colour's boundary slightly overlaps, underlaps, or gaps against another.

In screen or digital printing, multi-colour registration is controlled by the machine and is perfectly aligned. Misregistration in a multi-colour print is the clearest evidence of genuine multi-block handwork.

If you have access to two or more pieces from the same design and same batch, compare them side by side. Genuine hand block print pieces from the same batch will not be identical. The exact placement of the first print, the precise angle of each subsequent block, minor differences in ink loading — all of these mean no two hand-printed pieces are exactly the same. The difference may be very small, but it will be there.

Machine-produced fabric is identical within a batch. If two pieces of the same design placed side by side look like mirror copies with no variation whatsoever, they were not hand block printed. This test is particularly useful when buying at a market or wholesale showroom where multiple pieces of the same design are available.