Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

CHAPTER XVII

Skilled tattooers of Marquesas Islands a generation ago—Entire bodies covered with intricate tattooed designs—The foreigner who had himself tattooed to win the favor of a Marquesan beauty—The magic that removed the markings when he was recalled to his former life in England.

TATTOOING, the marking of designs on the human skin in life, is an art so old that its beginnings are lost to records. It was practised when the Neolithic brute went out to club his fellows and drag in his body to the fire his mate kept ever burning. Its origin, perhaps, was contemporaneous with vanity, and that was in the heart of man before he branched from the missing limb of evolution. It perhaps followed in the procession of art the rude scratchings on bone and daubing on rock. In the caves of Europe with these childish distortions are found the implements with which the savage whites who lived in the recesses of the rocks tattooed their bodies. The Jews were forbidden by Moses to tattoo themselves, and the Arabs, with whom they had much converse, yet practise it. In 1066 William of Malmesbury said that the English “adorned their skins with punctured designs.” Kingsley, with regard for accuracy, makes Hereward the Wake, son of the Lady Godiva, have blue tattooing marks on wrists, throat, and knee; a cross on his throat and a bear on the back of his hand. The Romans found the Britons stained with woad. The taste for such marks existing to-day is evidenced by the pain and price paid by sailors and aristocrats of all white nations for them. Tattooing has faded under clothing which covers it and a less personal civilization which condemns it. In the Marquesas Islands it reached its highest development, and here was the most beautiful form of art known to the most perfect physical people on earth.

From an old drawing
Te Ipu, an old Marquesan chief, showing tattooing

The famous tattooed leg of Queen Vaikehu

Until the overthrow of Marquesan culture, the island of Fatuhiva was the Florence of the South Seas. The most skillful workers at tattooing as well as carving lived in its valleys of Oomoa and Hanavave. During the weeks I have resided in them I delved into the history and curiosities of this most intimate of fine arts, now expiring if not dead. Nataro, the most learned Marquesan alive, took me into its intricacies and made me know it for the proud, realistic performance it was, a dry-point etching on a growing plate from which no prints were to be made. Nataro’s wife had one hand that is as famous and as admired in Fatuhiva as “Mona Lisa’s” portrait in Paris. A famous tuhuka wrought its design, a man equal in graphic genius, relatively, to Dürer or Rembrandt. Age and work had faded and wrinkled the picture, but I can believe her husband that, as a young woman, when the art was not cried down, people came from far valleys to view it. I recalled the right leg of the late Queen Vaekehu, the most notable piece of art in all the Marquesas until it went with its possessor into the grave at Taiohae. In late years the former queen of cannibals and last monarch of the Marquesas would not show her limb—a modest attitude for a recluse who lived with nuns and thought only of death. Stevenson confessed he never saw it above the ankle, though the queen dined with him on the Casco. He had a poet’s delicacy, an absolute lack of curiosity, and Mrs. Stevenson was with him. But he expressed a real sympathy for the iconoclastic ignorance that was destroying tattooing here.

The queen, who had been the prize of bloody feuds and had danced at the feast of “long pig,” had gone to her reward after years of beseechment of the Christian God for mercy, but I could almost see her once glorious leg in the life because of the two of my Atuona mother, Titihuti, which for months have passed my hut daily. They are replicas of the Queen’s, said Nataro, with the difference that Titihuti’s, beginning at her toe nails, reached a gorgeous cincture at her waist, while Vaekehu’s did not reach her hip, being, indeed, a permanent stocking. Some of the Easter Island women had an imitation of drawers delineated upon them, giving weight to the theory that these perpetuated the idea of clothing they wore in a colder clime, but of which they had preserved not even a legend.

Women were seldom tattooed above the waist, except their hands, and fine lines about the mouth and upon the insides of the lips. This lip-coloring was, doubtless, the efforts of invaders to make the red lips of the Caucasian women, the first Polynesian immigrants, conform to the invaders’ inherited standards, as the Manchus put the queue on the Chinese. The Marquesan men like dark men. The last conquerors here were probably a darker race than the conquered, and they preserved their ideals of color, but, having come without women and seized the women they found, they let them preserve their own standards, except for red lips, which they tattooed blue. These latest comers thought much pigment meant strong bones, and after a battle they searched the field for the darkest bodies to furnish fishhooks and tools for canoe-making and carving. They thought the whites who first arrived were gods, and when they found they were men, with their same passions, they thought they were ill. That is the first impression one who lives long with Polynesians has when he meets a group of whites. They look sickly, sharp-faced, and worried. They pay dear for factories and wheeled vehicles.