Polynesian, Samoan and Māori-inspired tattoos

Three living traditions behind one label

Tattoo entered English from the Pacific. Cook's account of Tahiti in 1769 spells the word tattow, after the Polynesian tatau, and the practice ran from Hawaiʻi to Aotearoa with a different grammar on almost every island group. Three of them supply most of what studios call Polynesian, and they are not interchangeable.

Samoan tatau never stopped, through missionary pressure and colonial rule alike. The pe'a, worn by men, is dense black from the waist to the knees and is named after the flying fox; the malu, worn by women, is finer, open work across the thighs, named for the motif placed behind the knee. Both are tapped in over several sittings with bone combs and a mallet by a tufuga ta tatau, a master whose right to the work passes through families. A pe'a abandoned unfinished, a pe'a mutu, is a lasting shame.

Marquesan work was among the most extensive anywhere, covering whole bodies including the face, and it came close to disappearing under French rule. Its revival from the 1980s leaned on the drawings the German ethnologist Karl von den Steinen made on the islands in the 1890s, which is partly why the enata figures and the Marquesan cross travel so easily: they were recorded in books.

Māori tā moko was cut rather than punctured. The uhi, a small chisel, carved grooves into the skin, and the face was the principal site. A moko records the wearer's whakapapa, their descent and standing, and is designed for that one person; it cannot move to someone else.

What the designs here borrow, and from where

For people outside those lines, Māori artists offer kirituhi, written skin: work in the visual language of moko that carries no one's whakapapa and does not go on the face. It is the respectful route for a non-Māori who loves the form, and the six Māori-inspired pieces here, the koru, the koru heart, the pikorua, the hei matau, the manaia and the taniwha, are drawn as kirituhi from carving motifs long worn as bone and pounamu pendants.

Each carries a reading. The koru is the unfurling fern frond, new growth; the hei matau recalls the hook with which Māui hauled up the North Island; the pikorua is two paths that cross, part and meet again; the manaia is a guardian messenger; the taniwha guards water and can drown as readily as it protects.

The Polynesian pieces use the public vocabulary shared across island groups: the honu, the shark and its teeth, the manta, the gecko, the frigate bird that navigators watched for because it roosts on land, the enata and the tiki face. None copies anyone's pe'a or malu, and the Samoan-style band follows the stacked-row structure of tatau without reproducing a particular one. The one-word glossaries studios hand out, spearheads for courage and shark teeth for protection, are a modern convenience; in the traditions a motif's weight also depends on where it sits and who wears it.

Solid black, drawn to the muscle

Everything in this set is black, because the traditions were: a single soot-based pigment, with tone made from how much skin was left bare. Thin parallel lines, rows of small triangles and solid fields sit side by side, and the thin lines age first. Set closer than a couple of millimetres they merge into a grey band, so a creature filled with pattern wants 10 cm or more.

The work is composed in panels that follow the body rather than sit on it. A shoulder piece in this manner runs across the deltoid, the upper chest and the top of the arm as one design, with bands that break where the muscles do, and a leg piece wraps the whole calf. Artists in the tradition often draw freehand onto the skin. The single motifs here are starting points: a turtle or manta at 10 to 12 cm sits well alone on a shoulder blade or outer calf, and joins a panel only when an artist builds bands around it.

Solid black is the most durable thing in tattooing and among the hardest to remove, so treat placement as final. If what you want is the real thing, a malu, a pe'a or a moko, that is a relationship with a practitioner from the culture rather than a design from a grid; some will not do it for anyone outside, and others will after a long conversation. Try a motif on a photo to settle size first.