Month: May 2025
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Blackwork
Blackwork is the term for impressing design patterns onto the skin with black, sometimes red, color pigments, including temporary dyes such as henna and tattooing dyes such as soot. Produced with combs, needles, and cutting tools, using techniques such as hand-tapped, hand-poked, skin-cut, and skin-stitched, numerous societies practice blackwork to express cultural identities, rituals, histories,…
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Journey to the Other World
In Polynesian parable, to lift the sky meant to expand the known world. Each discovery enlarged the habitable world, raising the height of the sky. Polynesians envisioned the Sky or the Heavens as a huge cupola covering their sea and islands. The sky cupola housed all the stars and heavenly bodies. When the Europeans appeared,…
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The Fish Hook of Maui
The story of the Polynesian Demi-God Maui fishing up islands explains the creation of the Hawaiian islands. In Polynesian lores, “fishing up islands” means to discover different islands, or to fish islands out from the sea. The story of Maui wishing to catch a big fish as an analogy for uniting the Hawaiian islands goes…
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Kawa Ora
Tattoos have been practiced for millennia across the world as a form of cultural and historical record. In ancient Egypt and Nubia, women tattooed on their thighs the image of Bes, a deity associated with fertility and childbirth. For the Ainu people of Japan, the tattoo was a symbol of beauty, a talisman, and an…
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The Peacock Bride
While the white color has become mainstream for wedding dresses across the modern world, it was not the only color considered historically. In fact, in numerous cultures, white has been the color reserved for funerals. Yet today, even societies using white traditionally to pay respect to the dead have embraced this color for their wedding…
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