Tā moko
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Tā moko is the permanent marking or tattooing as customarily practised by Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. It is one of the five main Polynesian tattoo styles.
Sketch of a Māori chief, 1773 engraving by T. Chambers based on a 1769 drawing by Sydney Parkinson, from the 1784 edition of A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas
"Portrait of a young Maori woman with moko", by Louis John Steele (1891)
Portrait of Tāmati Wāka Nene by Gottfried Lindauer (1890)
Painting by Gottfried Lindauer of a moko being carved into a man's face by a tohunga-tā-moko (tattooist)
Tohunga
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In the culture of the Māori of New Zealand, a tohunga is an expert practitioner of any skill or art, either religious or otherwise. Tohunga include expert priests, healers, navigators, carvers, builde
Tā moko
…indigenous people of New Zealand. It is one of the five main Polynesian tattoo styles (the other four are Marquesan, Samoan, Tahitian and Hawaiian). Tohunga-tā-moko (tattooists) were considered tapu, or inviolable and sacred. Tattoo arts are common in the Eastern Polynesian homeland of the Māori people, and…
"Matapo, a blind tohunga" in Te Tohunga by Wilhelm Dittmer, 1907
Tohunga handling the dead would be fed by another, as they would become tapu and so could not handle food.