In past centuries, tattooing was performed extensively throughout Oceania, from the island regions of the South Pacific to north-eastern Australia. Oceania was an ideal area for adventurers and seafarers like the English captain, James Cook. The inhabitants of all the islands Cook visited in this region were acquainted with tattooing. Cook, with his fellow traveller, the botanist Joseph Banks, was the inventor of the word tattoo, which is derived from the Tahitian word tatau. Until then, the phenomenon had been described, sometimes rather awkwardly, in a variety of ways, from ‘pricked paintings’ to the more prosaic ‘inserting blue dye under the skin’. These descriptions still required the further clarification that the signs were permanent. Tattooing gained its identity as a distinct art form with the invention of the word.