Black line drawing of a Māori-style moko facial design, with labels for forehead, brows, nose, nostrils, upper lip, cheeks and chin, placed across the face.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moko facial design with labelled regions

Other · Black and grey · Flash

A labelled line drawing of a facial design in the Māori moko style, showing spirals, curved lines and tapering strokes across the forehead, brows, nose, cheeks, upper lip and chin. Fine black linework with some grey shading is used throughout, on a plain white background. Each area of the face is marked with a black label and a leader line to show where each part of the design sits.

Other Spiral Curved line Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The printer had put the labels in the wrong place, and Aroha sat at the long bench with a red pen, deciding whether Nostrils could stay so close to the nose without crowding the spiral beside it. Her uncle Hemi watched from the stool by the window, his reading glasses pushed up into hair the colour of wet sand.

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'The line should unfold,' he said, when she showed him the cheek. 'Start in the middle and let it breathe out. You've closed it like a fist.' He took the pencil and drew a single curve that rose, turned, and let go of itself at the edge of the page, so the eye kept travelling after the stroke had stopped. He had been drawing like this since before she was born, first on butcher's paper pinned to the shed wall, then on good card kept in a drawer under the cash box. His lines had never once been tidy for the sake of it.

The brief came in on a Thursday, a folder of measurements and a note asking that the grey shading be kept soft. Hemi said soft was not the same as vague. 'Leave the brows alone,' he said. 'The one who wears them will know where the weight should sit.' Aroha did not argue. She worked until the light went orange on the fence outside, then traced the forehead fronds again, each stroke tapering to a point as if it had been hurried and then remembered itself.

When the sheet was done she wrote the last label by hand. Chin, in small upright capitals, with a leader line that ran down past the twin spirals and stopped just short of the margin. Hemi leaned over and looked for a long time. 'Good,' he said at last. 'Now it's open at the bottom. Someone else can finish it.'