Archive Note
The tradition is administered by hereditary master practitioners drawn from two chiefly families, the Sa Su'a of Savai'i and the Sa Tulou'ena of Upolu, and it was never legally prohibited or lost, unlike the Tongan, Marquesan, Tahitian, and Hawaiian traditions that were suppressed and later revived. The work is done with the 'au, a serrated comb of bone, boar tusk, or turtle shell on a wooden handle, struck with a wooden striker while assistants stretch the body and wipe blood and pigment; the pigment was traditionally soot from burnt candlenut. The pe'a marks a man's passage into adulthood and is completed over painful multi-day sessions, with the unfinished version carrying lasting shame. The English word "tattoo" comes from the Samoan tatau, documented in Joseph Banks's journal aboard the Endeavour at Tahiti in 1769. The most internationally visible branch of the lineage is the Sulu'ape family, whose late-twentieth-century work in Auckland, Amsterdam, Honolulu, and Los Angeles carried Samoan tatau into global tattoo culture; Su'a Sulu'ape Petelo's appearance at the 1985 Rome convention, on a joint invitation from Don Ed Hardy and Henk Schiffmacher, was the first by a tufuga at an international convention.