/tæˈtuː/
[noun] A permanent design or picture made on someone's skin by using a needle to put coloured ink under the surface. It can also refer to a military drum signal or a public outdoor performance by soldiers.
Tattoo comes from two completely unrelated words that sound identical — one from the Pacific Islands, one from Dutch military drums.
The story of 'tattoo' is actually two stories tangled together by coincidence, sharing a spelling and sound but coming from entirely different parts of the world. The first and more familiar meaning — a permanent mark on the skin — arrived in English directly from the Polynesian languages of the South Pacific. When the British explorer Captain James Cook sailed to Tahiti in 1769 on his first great voyage, his crew encountered islanders whose bodies were decorated with striking permanent markings. The Tahitian word for this practice was 'tatau', describing both the marks themselves and the act of making them. Cook and his naturalist Joseph Banks wrote about it in their journals, introducing the word to European readers. 'Tatau' entered English almost unchanged, first recorded in Cook's 1769 journal as 'tattaw', and quickly settling into the spelling 'tattoo' that we use today.
The Polynesian root 'tatau' likely comes from a Proto-Polynesian base meaning 'to strike' or 'to mark', which makes perfect sense given the traditional technique of tapping a comb-like tool with a mallet to drive ink beneath the skin. Related forms of the word appear across Pacific languages: the Samoan 'tatau', the Māori 'tā moko', and the Hawaiian 'kakau' all share this ancestry. When Cook's sailors returned to England bearing tattoos of their own — a practice that had long existed in some cultures but was now fashionably associated with the exotic South Seas — the word spread rapidly through British culture, from naval slang into everyday use.
The second 'tattoo', meaning a military drum signal or a ceremonial outdoor performance, has an entirely different origin. This word comes from the Dutch phrase 'doe den tap toe', literally meaning 'turn off the tap' — a signal given by drummers in the evening telling innkeepers near military camps to stop serving beer to soldiers and send them back to their quarters. The Dutch 'tap' referred to the tap or spigot on a barrel, and 'toe' meant 'to' or 'shut'. This phrase was borrowed into English military usage in the 17th century, initially as 'tap-too' or 'taptoo', and by the early 18th century had been shortened and respelled as 'tattoo'. It referred first to the drum-beat signal itself, and later to the elaborate military pageants — bands, marching, and music performed at dusk — that grew out of that tradition, such as the famous Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
By pure linguistic accident, these two words — one from the shores of Tahiti, one from the taverns of Holland — collided in English to produce a single spelling with two completely unrelated meanings. This is called homophony, and it rarely happens so dramatically or with such different cultural origins. When a British sailor in the late 1700s used the word 'tattoo', a listener would have had to rely entirely on context to know whether he meant a marking on his arm or a bugle call at nightfall.
Over the centuries, the skin-marking sense of 'tattoo' has grown enormously in cultural weight, shifting from a mark of the exotic or the outcast — sailors, circus performers, criminals — to a mainstream art form practised by millions. The verb form, 'to tattoo', meaning to apply such a design to someone's skin, emerged naturally from the noun shortly after its introduction to English. Meanwhile, the military 'tattoo' lives on in ceremonial contexts, a faint echo of Dutch soldiers being called home from their evening drinks by the beat of a drum — neither meaning aware of the other, sharing only a name.