Articles > Tattoos and Transgenders

A young man, semi-naked with a pareu (sarong) around his waist, lies on a woven palm leaf mat on the floor of the house. Like most houses in Samoan villages, it has no walls; allowing the tropical breeze to blow through.

A radio crackles with the strains of an earnest preacher. “Sin…sin…sinner…corrupt nature…sin” are the only words of his hellfire rantings to rise above the crackle and hiss. The little-visited South Pacific islands of Samoa may seem like paradise but others obviously think differently. Lafaele, the tattooist, takes a comb of a sharpened pig’s tusk tied to a handle, dips it into soot mixed with water and taps it against the youth’s skin with a small mallet.

Blood oozes from his wounds but he barely winces from the pain, even though he describes the sensation as “like a hot, sharp knife”. “Solo!” (“wipe!”) shouts Lafaele to one of his sons whose concentration has lapsed over the hours. He dabs at the blood with a rag. His other son stretches the young man’s skin with his hands, forming a canvas for Lafaele’s black geometric designs based on shark’s teeth and canoe paddles. Flies buzz at the wounds.

In this small Polynesian nation renowned for rugby, the men are real men. Look at 6’5” half-Samoan Hollywood actor and wrestler Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson for instance. But as well as its handsome, statuesque people, Samoa is famed for its tattooing, which – once discouraged by European missionaries - has been having a renaissance. I went to find out more.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: the word ‘tattoo’ comes from the Samoan ‘tatau’. A tatau is an intricate traditional tattoo design which covers men from midriff to knees. It takes days of incredible pain to complete - the sooty ink hammered into the skin with sharp pig tusk combs of different sizes. But it is a rite of passage many choose to endure. As the famous nineteenth century Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson, who ended his tuberculosis ridden days in Samoa, wrote in 'The Beach of Falesa', "a young man scarce reckoned himself grown till he had got his breech tattooed."

The first leg of my journey finds me in the historic colonial port of Apia, with its clapboard bars and open-air nightclubs which attract an eclectic crowd. Here I witnessed another aspect of traditional Samoan culture. The buxom barmaid with her gash of red lipstick was not all woman. Transgenders, as we might call them in our society, have sashayed through Polynesia since before the first days of European contact. An eighteenth century British sailor recorded in his journal how, much to his surprise, a ‘supposed damsel’ and ‘dancing girl’ when ‘stripped of her theatrical paraphernalia’ turned out to be ‘a smart dapper lad’.

The fa’afafine, as they are known, play an important part in society. Many work in shops or hotels, some in government. I saw one in complete Merchant Ivory garb, clutching her black Bible and heading towards the quaint whitewashed church in Apia one Sunday morning. Fa’afafine often help with household chores, child-rearing and even Sunday school. They are appreciated for being able to perform both ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ roles, a distinction which is very clear in Samoan villages.

Lafaele’s village is on a speck of an island called Manono, one mile square and thirty minutes by boat from the main island of Upolu. But first I had to take a bus from Apia.

Samoan buses are colourful wooden structures with glassless windows mounted on a truck chassis. They look like something out of Trumpton. As we circle around the capital, past dusty supermarkets selling enormous tins of mutton and packs of hard ships’ biscuits, we pick up more passengers. As people board, children and men make room by moving towards the back of the bus, until they are sitting on each other, sometimes three deep. Having a rugby playing Samoan (or two) sitting on your lap may sound like fun, but after an hour my legs were numb.

Manono is a car-free, sandy-bayed idyll, where school children saunter with their satchels under swaying palm trees, wandering the round-island footpath. I stayed in a simple wood and palm house on stilts over the sea, eating basic food cooked for me by my hosts, all for around £20 a night. It is a few decades removed from the relative hedonism of Apia and a world away from life in Britain.

Men venture off into the milky blue sea to spearfish from outrigger canoes, a coconut leaf basket ready for the catch. Women weave mats from sun-dried pandanus leaves or hack at coconuts to extract the meat for copra. Meals are cooked in an earth oven, heated by stones.

The evening sun burnishes the huge leaves of the breadfruit trees. And from Lafaele’s wall-less house comes the tap-tap of tattooing and the pleas of a plaintive preacher.

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