tatau

Tattoo (the body art) comes from Samoan tatau and Tongan tatu, referring to the traditional Polynesian practice of marking the skin with pigment. Captain James Cook's crew encountered the practice during his first voyage to the South Pacific in 1769. The ship's naturalist, Joseph Banks, recorded the word 'tattaw' in his journal. Cook himself wrote 'tattow.' The spelling stabilized as 'tattoo' by the end of the eighteenth century.

Tattooing was not new to Europeans — Roman soldiers, Celtic warriors, and medieval pilgrims had all marked their skin. But the Polynesian practice was systematically different: it was an art form with complex iconography, social meaning, and ritual context. The Samoan pe'a — a full-body tattoo for men — took weeks to complete and was considered essential to adult male identity. The European practices had no comparable word. The Polynesian word filled a gap.

There is a second, unrelated word 'tattoo' in English: the military drum signal calling soldiers to quarters at night, from Dutch taptoe ('close the tap' — the tavern's beer tap). This word dates to the 1640s, over a century before Cook's voyage. The two words are identical in spelling but completely unrelated in origin. One is Polynesian. The other is Dutch. They have coexisted in English for over 250 years.

The body-art word conquered. By the twentieth century, the military-signal meaning had faded to specialized usage, while the body-art meaning expanded to global ubiquity. An estimated 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo. The Samoan word, brought back by eighteen-century sailors, names a practice now found in every country on earth.