On a recent Friday in Wahiawā, Chamorro tattoo artist Gil Xavier Urbano carefully inked intricate Pacific Island patterns on a woman's leg.
These motifs, consisting of bold lines and circles, are inspired by ancient Chamorro pottery and cave drawings found throughout the Mariana Islands in Micronesia.
While tattoos have existed in the Pacific Islands for thousands of years, they have not been recorded among Indigenous Chamorros.
But Urbano said tattoos inspired by the ancient ceramic art form have increased in popularity over the last five years among Chamorros in the diaspora and the Mariana Islands who want to represent their culture in a contemporary way.
"The best way to do that is with tattoos," he said. "They're looking for a sense of home and to have home with them at all times."
Although there is no account of the Mariana Islands having a tattoo lineage, Chamorro artists must interpret what these patterns mean and where to place them on their bodies.
Finding identity
Kacey Bejado, a 25-year-old Chamorro woman in Hawaiʻi, said she wanted a tattoo connected to her culture. However, she couldn't find any accounts of body modifications in the Mariana Islands, apart from ancient Chamorros engraving their teeth. Then she learned about Chamorro pottery, which has motifs found on bowls and other ceramic creations.
Many pottery fragments are found throughout the shorelines of the Mariana Islands.
"Researching the designs, I didn't really find any meaning behind what exactly it means, but to me, this is my culture, and this is being Chamorro," she said.
She received a pottery-inspired tattoo on her spine from Urbano last year. It's a row of horizontal lines with circles on each end.
She said her tattoo is a way to carry on the Chamorro motifs through the contemporary art form.
"I just like telling the story of how hard it was to even come up with the design, and I get to share the story of how Guam has been colonized and a lot of our traditions have been changed, and a lot has been lost," she said.
"I'm still not sure what exactly the meaning to why it's a circle or a line, but I like that it tells the story of our culture and how it's a way to represent our culture," she continued.
Bejado's designs are simple, which intrigued Urbano when he tattooed her. He said he was honored to tattoo her with an art style that was new to him but also part of his culture.
"It was significant in my mind, as an artist, because it introduced me to a style of tattooing that I'd never done before and also is a part of me, too," he said.
Were there ever Chamorro tattoos?
There's a history of tattooing in many Pacific Island cultures, but archeologists have yet to find evidence that the Mariana Islands also practiced the art form. It's possible that the islands had a history of tattoos, but not many historical records of Chamorro traditions, like tattooing, existed before the Spanish colonization of the islands in the late 1600s.
Mike Carson, an archaeologist at the Micronesia Area Research Center at the University of Guam, said tattooing is never evident in the archaeological record until they find tattoo needles or artwork representing people with tattoos on them.
He said if they presumed tattooing existed in the Mariana Islands, archaeologists could estimate when it could have stopped — such as with the decline of dentate-stamped pottery, which completely disappeared as an art practice.
According to Carson, the dentate-stamped and circle-impressed works with white lime infilling are the oldest expressions, dating back over 3,000 years.
"The dentate-stamping technique very likely was related to the toolkits involved in tattooing and possibly in some of the older barkcloth traditions of East and Southeast Asia," he said.
"Similar parallels of dentate-stamped pottery with possible tattooing and barkcloth toolkits were noted later in the Lapita world of Melanesia and Polynesia around 3,300 to 2,500 years ago. The possible link has been a popular topic since the 1970s."
Although no known accounts of ancient Chamorros having tattoos, some designs were borrowed from other Micronesian cultures, such as the Yapese dolphin and whale motifs.
Legacy and resilience
Modern symbols are sometimes used in today's tattoos to represent ties to the Mariana Islands.
Gillian Dueñas is a Chamorro artist living in Washington who recently got into tattooing. Her first tattoo was a latte stone with the Guam seal, but she wanted to learn more about Chamorro body modifications.
Due to there being no known record of Chamorro body modifications through tattoos, Duenas said she was intentional about where to place the designs on her skin. It's to represent herself as an Indigenous Chamorro and artist.
She has Chamorro pottery designs and cave drawings on her body, including her arms and legs. She has even tattooed herself.
"I like to use those motifs a lot in my art as well," she said. "As a Chamorro artist living in the modern day, I want to honor and acknowledge those like original artists and pay homage to them and the groundwork that they laid for us to just exist in general and be here still and also for us to create."
"I always want to incorporate those aesthetics and tradition, as well as build upon it and contribute in my own way to our cultural art," she continued.
No matter what the symbols mean, Chamorros in the diaspora say tattoos are the manifestation of their ancestors' resilience and innovation.
