Illustration Friday: Tattoo

Aloha! I'm back from Hawaii and I had a great time! Last month, I performed with my hula halau at the beautiful Hawaii Theatre in downtown Honolulu. My husband and I stayed a little bit longer, caught up with friends and visited our ol' hangouts. The day we left, we stopped by the Honolulu Academy of Arts and took in a wonderful new exhibit called "Life in the Pacific of the 1700s: The Cook/Forster Collection of the Georg August University of Gottingen (Germany). We saw artifacts from ancient Hawaii, Tahiti and Samoa, including ancient tools for tattooing. Tattoos originated with Pacific Island peoples like the ancient Hawaiians. As a hula dancer, I've studied a little bit of tattoo design and have incorporated them into my costuming. The above sketch was created recently. It remotely pertains to Hawaiian tattooing as there is kaona or hidden meaning in the words--on the girl's arms, the "ly" on the bird. These refer to a poem titled "Softly."