Printed August 3, 2022
12 min read
Ta-tau, ta-tau, ta-tau. The sounds of used Polynesian tattoo tools echo because the needle-nice looking bone bites into my skin. While tattoo artist James Samuela’s assistant holds my leg right, I gape out the studio window to the verdant interior of Moʻorea and time slows down. I’ve conception about this tattoo for three years. From my initial in-particular person dialogue in the studio’s backyard to the tattoo’s completion, it’s been lower than three hours.
The legacy of Polynesian tatau, the onomatopoeic title for the observe of tattoo, began 3,000 years ago—the designs as various because the oldsters that keep on them. The Polynesian Triangle entails extra than a thousand particular particular person islands in the South Pacific Ocean forming quite loads of dozen cultural groups, most of which comprise their hold clear tattoo traditions.
Internationally, tattoos comprise change into extra trendy—not a inside most interest to be lined up at work. Indigenous tattoo traditions comprise these days change into extra considered: In 2021, a Māori journalist grew to change into the principle particular person with used face markings to host a primetime news program on Current Zealand tv. On the quilt of the July 2022 peril of Nationwide Geographic, Quannah Rose Chasinghorse—a mannequin with Hän Gwich’in and Oglala Lakota heritage—is photographed advance the red rock formations in Tse’Bii’Ndzisgaii, or Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park (the portrait by Kiliii Yüyan is phase of a operate package on the Native sovereignty circulation).
The weird and wonderful quality of Polynesian tattoo designs has inspired company, including me, to use dwelling a extra everlasting memento. But as we buy in mind the adaptation between honoring and appropriating a custom, how may additionally mute travelers who aren’t phase of that custom gain a tattoo respectfully?
On fable of the observe is interwoven with the Polynesian strategy of lifestyles, an a truly mighty potential requires consideration in the wait on of the motive of your tattoo and conversation with the tattoo artist.
Tattoos as cultural conversation
In former instances, Polynesian cultural observe used to be passed down verbally, but tattoos also conducted a phase in the switch of files with the physique as a canvas. “Historically, tatau served as a compose of ID or social pass, keeping computer screen of the family tree of the family, and representing vital milestones,” says Samuela, whose of us hailed from French Polynesia—his mother from the Marquesas island chain and his father from the island of Tahiti, the capital of French Polynesia.
“Counting on the archipelago where you came from, tatau used to be practiced in a different diagram and symbols had diversified meanings,” notes Samuela. “As an illustration, folks living on [an] island with mountains or an atoll with finest coconut bushes utilize diversified earth symbols in line with their hold ride.”
Across many Pacific islands, used cultural practices had been downhearted and outright banned from the time of early Western contact. “Tattooing used to be customarily achieved in defiance of colonial powers, so it used to be one of many principle things white males tried to suppress,” says Tricia Allen, an Oahu-primarily based entirely mostly tattooist with an intensive background in Polynesian history and creator of The Polynesian Tattoo This day and Tattoo Traditions of Hawaiʻi. “While in most smartly-liked a few years Pacific Islanders comprise revived many of their used arts and use pleasure in their cultural heritage, it’s understandable why tattoo in most cases is a tender topic for Indigenous folks.”
(Be taught the potential Marquesans are conserving their rich cultural heritage.)
Telling your hold memoir
To many Polynesian tattoo artists, the happy answer to the query of respect versus appropriation lies in the incontrovertible truth that each tattoo is entirely weird and wonderful, coming from a conversation between the customer and the artist.
“I query purchasers about themselves, their hold memoir, and what they wish their tattoo to indicate,” says Eddy Tata, a Marquesan tattoo artist who practices his work aboard the Aranui 5, the half of-passenger, half of-freighter ship that sails from Tahiti to the Marquesas, Tuamotu, and Society Islands. “As they talk, I’m already making the compose in my head. If the shopper exhibits me a image, attempting that particular compose, I won’t duplicate it. Replicating something that’s personalized is a compose of appropriation—appreciate stealing any person else’s memoir. I uncover that as I adapt the compose so it corresponds to the shopper’s memoir.”
In its keep of first drawing a tattoo stencil on paper and transferring it onto the skin, many Polynesian artists sketch the compose straight on the physique with a pen. That freehand sketch enables the tattooist the flexibleness to shape a one-of-a-sort composition as they shuffle.
(This aged Buddhist monk sp