Search This Blog

Polynesian Guy with Turtle Tattoo #2

This is an updated version of this photo of a Polynesian guy with a turtle tattoo on his shoulder. On his arms is a traditional shark-tooth pattern tattoo. The earlier version of this photo has proven to be the most popular photo on my website for some reason; I guess people must just love looking at guys with tattoos or are looking for ideas or traditional Polynesian tattoos to copy.


Polynesian turtle and shark tooth tattoo pattern
Polynesian turtle and shark tooth tattoo pattern
This image is also cropped for 8x10 printing since someone recently contacted me about buying an 8x10 print. If you are interested in prints, let me know. I can provide prints in a range of sizes and papers.


Here's an article that tells how traditional wood carving by Polynesian races evolved into the carving of the skin in what is now known as the tattooing: The Origins of Polynesian Tattooing.




Comments

Anonymous said…
I know this person and the person who did created the tattoo.

The Tattoo or Tatatau in Tongan
is a mapping of one's course in life and it provides guidance for one's duty to their culture.
The tatatau explains the journey that the individual has accomplished, and must continue to endure as a Tongan.
Anonymous said…
what is this guys name please ?

Samoan Youth

This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm

Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...