Maori tattoo art

These days with the ever growing popularity of tattoo art amongst all cultures through our increasing multi cultural society, traditional maori tattoo designs seem to be the choice of tattoo at the moment, almost like a fashion statement.
In fact traditional maori tattoo designs are some of the most popular tattoo designs around and there's a valid reason why traditional maori tattoo art is so popular in our current multi-cultural societies.
In today's world with so many tattoo artists and so many people looking to get tattoo art, you will find them going through and looking at other cultures in the hope of borrowing or worse of stealing other peoples designs to come up with their own tattoos. This can lead to artistic flair, but not so when choosing traditional maori tattoo designs .

 maori tattoo art

 maori tattoo

traditional maori tattoo designs
To understand traditional maori tattoo designs you need to understand traditional maori terminology. As you know if you were learning about science or any field there will be terms associated with that particular study and so it is with  traditional maori tattoo art. The ta moko is the name of the family identification of Maori that form part of the group known as whakapapa.
The reason it is important for maoris to know their family history is important especially when they were waring amongst each other over the centuries and before their arrival of the shores of new zealand.

 maori tattoo designs
There are still Maoris that can trace their history with these maori tattoos, some chiefs can look at a Maori tattoo design, read it like a book, they do this by feeling the texture, looking at the design and the precision that went into getting the tattoo and will be able to trace back some of these Maori family trees. There are designs that date back over a 2,000 year period in maori history, these chiefs have the skill and ability by looking at the design and are able to tell how far this tattoo dates back to or this particular design origins.What most people don't realise when looking at a design is that they tell a story, though they look like a swirl or twirl to us, they actually tell a full story when you know how to read these tattoos.

 Maori tattoo design

So you have learnt about the "ta" form of the maori language now its time to introduce the "moko" part, that is the important part as it involves the chiseling of the tattoo into the skin. So you think that getting a tattoo by today's standards is painful, well traditionally the maori made deep cuts into the skin using brutal tools and yes also the bones of albatrosses, for the maori to be able to distinguish themselves from the other tribes they used the color of the ink to tell the family history and the patterns on the skin would then allow someone to interpret the family history of these patterns.