Part 2.

TA: Most tattooists have photocopies of pages from the book by Karl von den Steinen [Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst, Berlin: D. Remier, 1928]. Very few have the full text and they don't read German. So they don't necessarily understand or know the meanings of the designs. Although a few do, as the Marquesan motif names are included, and the names of some patterns are still known by some Marquesans. Those that were involved in the early revivial in Tahiti (Tavana, Chime, Raymond and Porutu) know their stuff. But most have just adopted the Marquesan style as their own style and call it "Maohi."

SG: What about the Willowdean Handy Book [Tattooing in the Marquesas, Honolulu: The Bishop Museum. 1922]? Do they have that?

TA: Some do, but again, just little bits and pieces.

SG: Why wouldn't they have the whole book?

TA: These books are rare, even in the better libraries here, but they are very rare in Tahiti. They simply can't get such sources. In fact, I don't own either of these two books, but rather I have photocopies from our library. If one of them gets copies of a few pages, they will usually make copies and give it to their friends. And material gets spread around this way pretty quickly!

Sometimes the fact that they only have such limited access to these early sources causes some major misinterpretations. One of the funniest situations happened on one of the outer Society or Tahitian islands. Willowdean Handy, who wrote the book "Tattooing in the Marquesas", the Bishop Museum publication, in 1922, also wrote a French book, "The Art of the Marquesas" that was published in 1935. In this French book are 20 to 30 pages of motifs that are lettered "a", "b", "c" on through the alphabet, and then when there are more than 26 motifs to a page, "aa", "bb", "cc" and the pages or plates are numbered one, two, three and so on. Now a young Tahitian tattooist had a photocopy of one of these pages and somehow mistook this to be an ancient Tahitian alphabet. He would ask the name of his customer and then look at the letters and then find the corresponding design elements and incorporate these into a band or a tattoo so that it spelled out the person's name. What was really amusing to me was my reactions. My first thought was "what about Q's, and other letters that the Polynesian language doesn't use"? As there are only about 12 letters that most Polynesian languages utilize. My next thought was: "this isn't Tahitian at all, it's Marquesan". It was a minute or so later that I realized the most important point of all, that Polynesian languages were not written. The idea of a Tahitian alphabet is absurd! Anyway, I kept my thoughts to myself. I told the tattoo artist that I had that whole book that his page came from, and I would bring it to him. I spent 15 hours on the inter-island freighter going back to the main island, paid fifty cents a page to photocopy the entire book and went clear back out to Bora Bora again - about 300 miles - just to give him the full text, thinking that maybe he would then see for himself what this was. That it isn't a Tahitian alphabet, it was just the author's way of categorizing and discussing the motifs. So I took him the book and he said "Oh, good, there are many pages. I can split it up among my two brothers who are also tattooists." I said, "No you don't." and I showed him how it worked. The book is in French and he does read. So I told him he should keep all these pages together and loan your brothers the entire set. But I realized shortly after and, again, 300 miles away back on Tahiti, when I met a girl on the street who had a beautiful tattoo, and I stopped her and asked her, in Tahitian, "Who made that? That's very nice." She proudly said, "It's my name in ancient Tahitian." And I realized then that of course it is! If that's what it meant to her, who are we to say that it isn't?

Anyway, most tattooists have a collection of photocopies pages from various sources. Although there is some rivilary between tattooists there, they do tend to share their sources-- at least with a friend or two, who with share it with their friends, and so on. My first time in Tahiti in 1991 I had taken a bunch of "Tattootime"s and gave them to maybe eight or ten tattooists, and the next time I was there about a year and a half later it was really amazing to see how widely photocopies of those had been distributed. I would be on an island three hundred miles away and the guys would pull out their drawings or their portfolios and they would have photocopies from "Tattootime". And "Tattootime" you certainly don't find down in Tahiti.

SG: Why not?

TA: They're not available for sale. Neither are tattoo magazines

SG: Couldn't people order them?

TA: Sure, they could order them, but for many of these guys it's just not in the Polynesian or Tahitian way of thinking to do something like mail order away for a magazine. If it can't be gotten locally it's in their minds something unobtainable. For example, some that have traveled to the states went to tattoo shops and asked to buy equipment. They thought that tattoo shops in America would sell tattoo machines. And they were quite surprised to find that they couldn't buy them in shops. You have to mail order.

SG: And so then did the tattoo revival spread from Tahiti to the other islands?

TA: Today there's a lot of interisland contact and travel between Tahiti and the Marquesas because they're both part of French Polynesia. The only TV stations are in Tahiti. So in the Marquesas you get Tahitian news, which they give both in French and Tahitian. In order to finish a high school degree until fairly recently one had to travel to Tahiti. Tahitians and Marquesans - all French Polynesians - do a mandatory two years of military service. Usually they are sent to Tahiti for their military service. Also there are a fair number of Marquesans living in Tahiti that migrated a generation or two ago. A few of the Marquesans living in Tahiti really developed an interest in tattooing early on. So it was, in part, the Tahitian influence that to some degree started the Marquesan revivial.

SG: What year did the Marquesan revival start?

TA: Within a couple of years of the revived interst in Tahiti. So in the mid-eighties.

SG: And what's the population of Tahiti?

TA: 80,000 in the early 1990's. I don't know an exact figure today.

SG: How many tattoo artists are working in Tahiti, and how many in the Marquesas?

TA: In 1993, I compiled a list of three hundred on the main island of Tahiti. Most of those three hundred are what you'd call scratchers. They're not all serious tattooists. There are maybe about 20 who are doing really good high quality work on the main island. In the Marquesas there are about eight to ten that I would call top-notch semi-professional tattooists. Probably an overall count would be 25 to 30 in the Marquesas. The population of the Marquesas is significantly smaller than that of Tahiti.

SG: What about tattooing in Samoa? How is it different from the other islands?

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