Papuan Tattoo Is An Aid To Beauty

From an AAP-Reuter Correspondent in Port Moresby

Thousands of Papuan native girls still are inclined to think a good tattoo is a better beauty aid than cosmetics in their search for a husband.

But some of them go through agony to get tattoos. Not all of them have a choice. In some central Papuan tribes, tattooing is traditional.

Each design tells a story, and if the story is grand enough the girl wearing it will have many suitors.

Authoritative anthropologists have been unable to find the origin of tattooing in Papua. There are no legends, and no records.

But everyone knows that a girl wearing an ornate, all-covering tattoo has an important father and an im portant family.

“We mark them in special ways to commemorate the great deeds of their parents and to remember the great feasts they gave,” an elderly male Papuan told researchers.

“And we mark a V on a woman’s neck when she marries to warn young men that she must now be faithful to her husband . . . We have always done this,” he said.

A lovelorn swain sees beauty in every line and the true history of the girl’s family, the number and importance of feasts given by her father, and the number of success ful trading expeditions he made to the faraway Gulf of Papua.

A husband knows that his girl children will carry the tattoo records of the great deeds of his lifetime.

When old enough for the first tat tooing, a girl is taken, sometimes protestingly, to the hut of the woman who is keeper of the tattooing lore.

A pandanus mat is the open table, and the instruments ar< old as Papua-New Guinea’s civ tion.

With quick strokes with a I made from the mid-rib of a coc frond, the clan’s traditional em is painted on the girl’s belly.

The thorn of a native lemc the needle, and the hammer fragment of heavy clam wrapped in dried pandanus leave The tattoo expert flickers a the painted pattern, piercing the just enough to bring occasional ( of blood.

Firm hands hold down the as she writhes.

If she has been brave, and be to an important family, a few lines are drawn on the foreheai the chin and on the cheeks.

The patterns on the foreheac drawn close to the hairlines—o account must a child be tattooe the centre of the face unless father has been the leader of a cessful and dangerous trading e? tion in a canoe.

Surplus ink is rubbed into pinprick wounds.

Years pass and the girl re puberty—and the time for her ond series of tattoo designs, time her back is covered, fror armpits to the top of the breast Her legs are tattooed only some time in village history father was a donor of a great fe; Later, when she reaches mar able age, the girl’s thighs are tatl and when she marries, she re a V design at the neck.

Papuan men are tattooed or exceptional circumstances —and confess it’s the way they prefe