TATTOOING.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1014, 7 October 1882, Page 3

TATTOOING.

Great excitement is at present rife in certain portions of the East Coast district on the subiect of tattooing. That ancient pratice, which the missionaries always set their faces against as a symbol of the heathenism they were laboring to abolish (says a correspondant of the Auckland Herald), is now being revived as regards female benuty alone. The sterner proportion of Maori humanity is fairly converted from heathenism on this point. The operating artist (save the maik !) charges two pounds for each victim thus defaced by a process of slow torture. Not merely young girls, but adult married women are operated upon. The chin and the two lips are the parts tatooed. The process consists in hewing into the flesh with a small bone chisel, and in the furrows thus formed, depositing a stain of blue color. When the chin only is operated upon the " effect " is not so ruinous to beauty, but the dyeing of the lips destroys the red color, and subtitutes a ghastly blue. Nothing perhaps could better show the irreclaimable ancivilisable, un-Europeanisable condition in which this hideous relic of savegery proves the poor Maori to be still enhanced. There is a law to protect from defacement the current coin of the realm ; surely our legislators might interfere for the protection of tht human face divine."