ed at approximately right angles to a wooden handle. So far as I know, no old instrument from the Cook Islands has been preserved. The instrument was termed ivi (bone) and in Mangaia, the term was qualified by the process, ivi ta tipatipa. Savage gives the name of the instrument as "ui tatau"; but, as uhi is the name used in New Zealand and other islands, the Rarotongan term is probably u'i tatau.
The tapping instrument was a short piece of wood as thick as the little finger. In Aitutaki, it was termed rakau papa or rakau patupatu, wood for tapping or beating.
A swab termed 'oroi toto ('oroi, to swab; toto, blood) was a piece of bark cloth. The operator wound it around the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand and swabbed up the blood during the operation.
The pigment used throughout the islands was the soot caught under an inverted bowl or coconut-shell cup held over burning kernels of candlenut (tuitui). The soot was scraped into another coconut-shell cup and mixed with water to the required consistency. It then received the general name for charcoal or soot, ngara'u.
The points of the bone comb were dipped in the prepared pigment, placed on the skin and lightly struck with the tapping instrument. Any blood that oozed out from the punctures was swabbed up with the bark cloth. By successive punctures, the appropriate art motifs were applied to the various parts of the human body. When the tattooing was fairly extensive, the operation was conducted in stages with intervals to allow the patient respite from the pain. In olden days, honor demanded that the patient continue until the full pattern denoting his rank and social position was completed. In more modern times, tattooing was continued because of a certain amount of sentiment for the past, but pain limited the operation to a smaller area. With the waning sentiment and the passing away of tattooing artists, the art languished and died out. The abandonment of tattooing was also influenced by the missionary attitude of antagonism to what they considered a "heathen practice."
The tattooing artist (ta'unga ta tatau) was a professional who had learned the art from established experts. He was well fed during the period of work and given a feast and presents of food and other goods when the operation was concluded. The relatives of the person tattooed helped to provide the food and presents. More care was devoted to the tattooing of chiefs, because of their better social and economic rating. In Aitutaki, when I asked if anyone was too poor to be tattooed (70, p. 363), I was told that "There was no man who did not have relatives."
The motifs and patterns in tattooing are held by the natives to have derived from wood carving (pana). However, it is probable that some of the art motifs were worked out in freehand on bark cloth. It seems natural that art motifs should have been worked out on inanimate material such as wood and cloth before they were accepted as pleasing and transferred to sensitive flesh. There seems little doubt that some of the more elaborate Marquesan tattooing designs were worked out originally on wooden bowls and that the Maori double spiral and scroll were done on wooden figures before they were accepted as suitable for tattooing designs. In the Cook Islands, the full tattooing was not recorded by the early missionaries and others who had the opportunity of seeing it. At this late day we can only record the few motifs that survived on individuals or in the memory of the old people who saw them. There is no information as regards the tattooing details in Atiu, Mauke, and Mitiaro; but a few motifs from Aitutaki, Mangaia, and Rarotonga are herein recorded.
Gudgeon (36, p. 217) recorded four motifs in 1905. He stated that each canoe that came from the earlier home of Havaiki was carved on the bow with a distinctive pattern which was adopted by those who came in the canoe as a tattooing motif to distinguish them from other tribes. He states that the continuous chevron motif (fig. 70, a) was introduced by Te Muna-korero and tarmed pa-maunga in memory of a mo