Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
Not only was a Moko expert of true ability a rarity for whose services there was always an "effective demand," but, if not well paid for his labours, the tattooer could make his sitter suffer in more ways than one.
It was wonderful to hear from her son after three years and pleasant to know he had found a woman. She must be a haoe, a white woman. Were the women of that island, Chile, white? I said that they ran the color scale, from blond to brown, from European to Indian, but that this Jeanette who was a tattooer, a maker of pictures on canvas, no doubt an artist of merit, must be pale as a moonbeam.
My memory does not retain the various emblems thus perpetuated in men's skins; they were largely patriotic and extremely conventional, each practised tattooer having doubtless his own particular style. Many midshipmen of my time acquired these embellishments. I wonder if they have not since been sorry.
But his mind would take no account of these familiar features; as he dodged in and out along the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory would serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown faces and white, of skipper and shipmate, king and chief, would arise before his mind and vanish; he would recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour of dawn; he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating festival; perhaps he would summon up the form of that island princess for the love of whom he had submitted his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer, and now sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so strange a figure of a European.
For Maitland, in the course of his philanthropic labors, had known old Dicky Shields, the naturalist and professional tattooer, as a hopeless mauvais sujet. But Dicky's daughter, Margaret, had been a daisy flourishing by the grimy waterside, till the young social reformer transplanted her to a school in the purer air of Devonshire.
There is Dutch when he was a boy, when he was a sailor, when he grew up and became a world famous tattooer. There is Dutch surrounded by queens of the Midway, Dutch with his arms debonairly thrown round the shoulders of snake charmers and other bizarre and vanished contemporaries. The photographs are yellowed. They make a curious collection. They make the soulless piano sound a bit softer.
The design is drawn on the skin with ink made of soot and water. Then the tattooer pricks the skin through the design. The instrument used for tattooing is called "cha-kay'-yum." It consists of from four to ten commercial steel needles inserted in a straight line in the end of a wooden handle; "cha-kay'-yum" is also the word for needle.
Indeed, with a vanity elsewhere unheard of, many spend no small portion of their days thus sitting to an artist. To begin the work, the period of adolescence is esteemed the most suitable. After casting about for some eminent tattooer, the friends of the youth take him to his house to have the outlines of the general plan laid out.
The sharpened albatross bone used by the Maori tattooer, had five times scored his countenance. He was in his fifth edition, and betrayed it in his haughty bearing. His figure, draped in a large mat woven of "phormium" trimmed with dogskins, was clothed with a pair of cotton drawers, blood-stained from recent combats.
But our chief visitor was one Mapiao, a great Tahuku which seems to mean priest, wizard, tattooer, practiser of any art, or, in a word, esoteric person and a man famed for his eloquence on public occasions and witty talk in private. His first appearance was typical of the man.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking