Many find spiritual solace in the tattoo parlor, where Kopua helps them get in touch with their ancestors.
Serendipity helped convince Oriana McLeod that the time had come for her first tattoo. The 47-year-old Maori woman's path crossed Kopua's at a recent world music festival in this west coast town.
Feeling the urge to discover the moko that would announce her spiritual rebirth, she phoned several family members to ask their approval. Her father, a tribal elder, not only gave his blessing, but encouraged her with the news that Kopua, 46, was a distant relative.
"This is my time," she thought, and took the chair next to Kopua's worktable.
A bear of a man with a whisper of a voice and large tattoos emblazoned across his face and arms, Kopua picked up his pistol-shaped tattoo gun in a large hand sealed in a black latex glove.
Then, like a painter touching the tip of a fine brush to his palette, Kopua dipped the gun in a small pot of ink and began injecting McLeod's upper arm, drawing free-form from an encyclopedic memory of traditional designs.
For an hour and a half, McLeod turned her head away, or closed her eyes, wincing as Kopua worked on his creation, which depicted the sea and the tossed net of Te Huki, a venerated ancestor of her tribe who extended his power over a vast area by marrying the daughters of several local chiefs.
Like two sets of roiling waves, the pattern of curves and swirls and what seems a squid-like eye transformed McLeod's right shoulder into a page of her family history. Called whakapapa, this genealogy is the expansive network of bloodlines and kinship that makes someone Maori.
Moko can also honor an important event in a person's life, such as graduating from college, getting married or experiencing an epiphany, said Te Awekotuku, a professor of Maori culture at the University of Waikato in Hamilton.
It's similar to a soldier getting "Mom" tattooed on his arm, or a Latino kid in East Los Angeles declaring his gang affiliation with special symbols and colors on his hand, she said.
"I think what you see in the barrios of L.A. -- the imagery, the sacredness, the assertion of identity and pride -- is actually no different from us," she said. "Just as in the Maori world, they have recurrent symbols that have particular messages for the wearer, the viewer and the family member."
Like most other Maori, she wishes tourists and the trendy would respect what the tattoos are saying and not try to warp them into fashion statements.
