How did tattoo travel from the Pacific to the rest of the world?
JE: Modern tattoo traveled on bodies, thanks to mobile Pacific Islanders and to visitors. Many explorers, traders, sailors, and even a renegade missionary or two acquired the patterns. It also traveled in books, inspiring narratives by writers like Herman Melville and anthropologists like Margaret Mead. Some of the more troubling ways in which the patterns traveled involved traffic in human beings, both living and dead. The first tattoos displayed in England were on the living body of Giolo, a Visayan man, who was purchased by an Englishman and displayed as “the painted prince” until he died in Oxford in 1692. Traffic in “baked heads”—tattooed ancestral heads alienated from sacred Māori mortuary practice—reached such a peak that they warranted their own entry in the customs ledgers in Sydney. Though the trade was banned in 1831 it continued, and some of those human heads still reside in leading museums in Washington, DC, and New York. Q: Why does tattoo matter? JE: Tattoo is a living p
