This book documents the extraordinary, intertwined histories of processes of cultural exchange and Pacific tattoo practices. Art historians, anthropologists and scholars of Oceania provide a transcultural history of tattooing in and beyond the Pacific. Together they offer a tantalizing glimpse into the plethora of stories and cross-cultural encounters that lie between the blood on a sailor's body in the eighteenth century and the hammering of a Samoan tattoo tool in the twenty-first.