traditionVeiqia
veiqia · Fijian
A woman's marks, by a woman called the dauveiqia
| Where it goes | thighs, waist to knee |
|---|---|
| Stopped by | Christian missionaries from the 1830s |
| Notes | Older women held the expertise; the fee was tapa cloth, whale teeth or a liku skirt. |
| Ink | Soot and water |
| Years between | 1910–2015 (105) |
about 1,700 – 2,026 · One tattooist left by 1908; revived by an artists' collective in the 2010s
-17.8000, 178.0000 · OpenStreetMap
What it is
Fiji: girls marked at puberty by older women called dauveiqia, paid in tapa cloth and whale teeth.
The long version
By 1908 there was one recorded practitioner left — a woman called Rabali, tattooing until about 1910. That is as close as this site gets to a date for the end of a tradition, and it comes with a name.
The revival is as precisely dated. The Veiqia Project, a collective of Fijian women artists, took the practice up from the archives and the objects in the 2010s. Samoa's own origin story sends the tatau across from Fiji, which makes the revived practice older than the one that borrowed it.
Connected to
- Tatau Where Samoa says the tools came from.
- Stopped, and started again The best-dated stop and restart on the site.
Named here by
- Tatau Fiji, where Samoa says it came from — and where only women were marked.
- Who holds you still And where the holders are the other women.
- Rabali The practice.
- Stopped, and started again The clearest one.
- The Veiqia Project The practice.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Veiqia — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there