| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Su'a Sulu'ape Paulo II |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Auckland · Aotearoa New Zealand |
| Date | 1979 CE |
| Style / Technique | Sāmoan tatau, hand-tapped pe'a and malu |
| Connected to | Su'a Sulu'ape Alaiva'a Petelo, Polynesian Tatau, Keone Nunes |
Archive Note
Su'a Sulu'ape Paulo II was born around 1949 at Matafa'a near Lefaga, on the island of Upolu in Sāmoa. He carried a tufuga ta tatau title, master tattooist, within the Sa Su'a, one of the two chiefly families historically authorized to hold that title. The title is conferred inside the family, not claimed. A man designated for it serves years as a solo, an assistant who stretches skin, wipes blood, and prepares pigment, before he is allowed to wield the comb and the striker himself.
What he tapped was the pe'a, the male tattoo that runs from the waist to the knees, and the malu, the lighter tattoo worn by women on the thighs. The work is done by hand. A toothed comb is dipped in pigment, set against the skin, and driven in by a second stick struck against it, one tap at a time, across days of sitting. Paulo II demonstrated that this was a rigorous and exacting discipline, not a curiosity, and he raised its standing wherever he showed it.
In the 1970s he relocated to Auckland and made the city the principal hub of the Sulu'ape lineage outside Sāmoa. He served the fast-growing Sāmoan community across New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, took international guests at his Auckland home, and ran the main continuous-practice site the family kept outside the islands. From the 1980s onward he held residencies at the Amsterdam Tattoo Museum at Henk Schiffmacher's invitation, placing Sāmoan tatau in direct dialogue with European tattoo culture.
He was the principal tatau collaborator of the New Zealand photographer Mark Adams, a working relationship documented from about 1979 through 1999. That archive is much of the surviving visual record of his hand. Through Don Ed Hardy's Hardy Marks publishing program, including Tattoo Time, his work also reached the American tattoo world during the same window that the Western neo-tribal blackwork channel was independently drawing on Polynesian sources.
Paulo II was celebrated and at times contested within Sāmoan circles. He was willing to tattoo non-Sāmoans and to share the customary methods of the hand-tap tools with the outside world, and he allowed stylistic innovation into the work. By one account he and his nephew Su'a Sulu'ape Aisea Toetu'u began in the 1990s to extend the family's stewardship into the Tongan tatatau tradition, a sister practice outlawed in 1839 under the Vava'u Code and nearly erased from living memory.
He was killed at his Auckland home on 25 November 1999. By one account, given in later encyclopedic sources, the killing followed a domestic dispute, but the contemporaneous reporting and any court record have not been verified, so the circumstances are best left open. His brother Su'a Sulu'ape Alaiva'a Petelo became the senior authority of the line after his death. The lineage Paulo II carried abroad is now the principal channel by which Sāmoan tatau entered the wider tattoo world, and it runs on through Petelo, through Aisea in Tonga, and through the working tufuga the family seeded across the Pacific rim.