The Two Women Who Brought Tattooing from Fiji

Two sisters swim from Fiji to Samoa.

This is the journey as the tradition describes it: Tilafaiga and Taema, twin sisters who are also war goddesses, make the crossing from Fiji carrying the tattooing instruments and the knowledge of how to use them. The swimming is supernatural — they cover the ocean between the two island groups, which is not a short distance, in the way divine beings cover distances, which is to say completely and without stopping.

They are singing as they swim. The song is a mnemonic — it carries the information they must not forget. The song says: tattoo women, not men. The art is for women. The instruments and the patterns are for the female body.

They encounter a clam on the surface of the ocean. The clam is fascinating — large, beautiful, unlike any they have seen. They stop to examine it. In the stopping, the song trails off. They forget which verse they were in. They start again from the part they remember.

The part they remember has the instruction backwards.

They arrive in Samoa singing: tattoo men, not women.

And so it was established. In Samoa, the pe’a — the great full-body tatau from waist to knee — is worn by men, the most demanding and prestigious body-marking in the Pacific. The malu — the women’s tatau, applied to the thighs — is secondary in the tradition, though it is also sacred and meaningful. The structure inverts what Fiji has: in Fiji, as in some other island traditions, the extensive tattooing is on women.

The sisters realize their mistake when they arrive and the work begins. It is too late. The knowledge has already been transmitted, the instruments are being used, the patterns are being applied. The confusion at the clam has become the practice of a civilization.

The story is told partly as comedy and partly as cosmological explanation. It has the lightness of a story that acknowledges tradition could have been otherwise — that the social structures we take as natural are contingent, dependent on a memory lapse in the middle of a long swim, on a beautiful clam at the wrong moment.

But it also says something true about tradition: once a practice is established, the reasons for it become secondary. The Samoan men who undergo the pe’a — a process lasting several weeks, conducted by a specialist tufuga ta tatau using traditional bone combs and hammers, covering the body from waist to knee in patterns of astonishing complexity and precision — are not doing it because they think Tilafaiga and Taema forgot the instruction. They are doing it because the pe’a connects them to every man who wore it before them, to a lineage of marked men going back to the moment the two sisters arrived singing their inverted song.

The body is the record. The tattoo is the genealogy. The pain of its application is the price of the connection.

Tilafaiga and Taema went on to become war goddesses, and also the patron spirits of tattooing. They made the mistake, and they also govern the practice that grew from the mistake. This is appropriate: the beings who gave you a tradition are not necessarily infallible. They are the ones who showed up with the instruments and started.