Sulu’ape Mālama o Mataitoa Keone Nunes

Sulu’ape Keone Nunes — born John Estrella Nunes on September 8, 1957, in Morioka, Japan — is the practitioner most responsible for the revival of kākau uhi, traditional Hawaiian hand-tapped tattooing, from its near-disappearance in the twentieth century. His formal title, Kahuna Kā Uhi, places him in the category of Hawaiian specialist priest and master. He prefers the term “cultural practitioner” over “tattooist”: the distinction is not cosmetic. For Nunes, tattooing is inseparable from the genealogical research, ritual preparation, and spiritual responsibility that frame each piece of work.

His father, James Joseph Nunes, was American with Native Hawaiian heritage; his mother, Kuniko Yuzawa, was Japanese. The family moved to O’ahu when Keone was two years old. He grew up in Wai’anae, on the island’s leeward west coast — a predominantly Native Hawaiian community — and attended Wai’anae schools before graduating from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa with a degree in anthropology and a certification in Hawaiian language. He went on to teach at Hawai’i Community College, worked at the Bishop Museum, and taught at Kamehameha Schools.

Kākau is the Hawaiian word for the act of tattooing — from ka, to strike, and kau, upon: to strike upon the skin. Uhi is the resulting tattoo. The compound kākau uhi describes the full practice of traditional Hawaiian hand-tapped tattooing, which has been present in the islands since the first Polynesian settlers arrived, likely between the third and eighth centuries CE.

Pre-contact Hawaiian tattooing was practised across the population, with designs covering the body in bold, asymmetrical black patterns. The asymmetry was deliberate: the right side of the body was associated with spiritual protection and typically received denser, solid coverage; the left side carried more open, biographical work. The designs encoded genealogy (moʻokūʻauhau), rank, achievements in war, fishing, and navigation, connections to family gods (ʻaumakua), and key life events. Women received tattoos on the hands, arms, and lips; chin tattoos, known as kūpeʻe, marked significant milestones in a woman’s life. Temporary mourning tattoos, made with plant juices, recorded grief. A fully tattooed person was a fully documented person.

The practitioner was not simply a craftsman. Kākau was performed by a kahuna — a Hawaiian specialist priest — and the role came with an exclusive and specific privilege: the kahuna kā uhi was the only person permitted to draw blood from aliʻi (royalty) without being killed for it. The ritual dimensions of the work included prayers and chants during tattooing, the ceremonial preparation of tools, and the understanding that the designs held mana — spiritual power — that the tattoo transferred to the wearer. In Nunes’s words:

“When you receive a tattoo, you not only change physically, but oftentimes there is a deeper change within you.”

The practice was documented by European sailors and artists in the late eighteenth century — Captain Cook’s voyages in 1778 provided some of the earliest written accounts — though the historical record is imperfect. Most surviving visual documentation was created from memory by observers who couldn’t always follow the designs they recorded. Hawaiian tattooing was not, in the assessments of those early European witnesses, the most technically refined in the Pacific; Marquesas and Samoan work drew more admiring commentary. But the breadth of its coverage, its genealogical depth, and its spiritual function were distinctive.

The missionaries who arrived from New England beginning in 1820 targeted kākau directly, as they did most expressions of the old Hawaiian religious and social order. By the end of the nineteenth century, the practice had largely ceased in the Christianised population. The oral knowledge held by kupuna (elders) survived in fragments — remembered by people who had never practised tattooing themselves, transmitted as cultural memory rather than working craft. The unbroken technical lineage, the knowledge of how to actually make and use the tools, had been broken.

Nunes’s path to kākau uhi was indirect. He grew up surrounded by Hawaiian cultural practice — not in any formal institutional sense, but through regular conversation with kupuna in his family and community. He describes this as “talking story”: long, unhurried exchanges in which elders would discuss Hawaiian life before Western contact. Tattooing would come up in those conversations, embedded in broader discussions about what Hawaiians looked like, how they presented themselves, and what the designs meant.

In 1987, he founded a hālau — a hula troupe — and began competing. As he delved deeper into the cultural commitments hula required, he became interested in marking them physically. His aunt, Muriel Lupenui — a significant figure in his cultural education — gave him a pattern she considered appropriate for him: a design rooted in his family history. In 1990, while preparing for a hula competition, he arranged for it to be applied. The design was an alaniho — a traditional tattoo that runs from the hip to the ankle — and it was done with a modern tattoo machine.

The machine bothered him. The design was ancestral; the method wasn’t. That gap became the starting point of his work.

Unable to find anyone in Hawai’i who could teach him the traditional hand-tapping method — the lineage had been broken — Nunes began applying traditional Hawaiian designs using a machine, a compromise he understood as temporary. His work came to the attention of Dutch tattoo artist and historian Henk Schiffmacher, who was making a documentary on tattooing worldwide. Schiffmacher put Nunes in contact with Su’a Sulu’ape Paulo II.

Su’a Sulu’ape Paulo II (1949 or 1950–1999) was a tufuga ta tatau — Samoan master tattooist — from Matafa’a near Lefaga, Samoa, and one of the most respected Polynesian tattoo practitioners of his generation. He had been based in Auckland since the 1970s and had spent decades working across the Pacific, collaborating with Māori, Hawaiian, and other Polynesian communities. He came from one of the hereditary Samoan tattooing families and held the Sulu’ape title, which designated mastery and lineage continuity.

Nunes met Paulo in 1996. In what Nunes describes as an intensive introduction, Paulo showed him how to make a traditional tattooing tool — the mōlī, a comb-like instrument with sharpened bone teeth attached to a wooden handle — and to use it correctly. From that meeting forward, Nunes worked only with traditional tools. He travelled to meet Paulo repeatedly in the years that followed, deepening the practice.
The tools, as Paulo taught and as Nunes uses them:

The method is the same one used across Polynesia and, in its broad outlines, across much of the Pacific and parts of Southeast Asia for thousands of years. It is slower than machine tattooing, more physical, and leaves a result that looks different from machine work — the lines carry slight irregularity, the ink sits differently in the skin, and the healing process differs.

Nunes ritually prepares his tools before each session. A documented pre-dawn ceremony involves bringing the tools to the shore break at Wai’anae and immersing them in the water, while praying to Kahekili — the Hawaiian tattooed god — to make the tools aware that they are about to perform sacred work.

Paulo died suddenly on November 25, 1999. Nunes has described the loss as devastating. In 2001, the Sulu’ape family formally conferred the Sulu’ape title on Nunes, making him the first Hawaiian and the first non-Samoan to receive it. The title carries the genealogical weight of the Sulu’ape lineage: it signals not personal accomplishment but continuity within a specific hereditary teaching tradition. Nunes’s full formal name is now Sulu’ape Mālama o Mataitoa Keone Nunes.

Receiving an uhi from Keone Nunes is not a process of browsing a flash sheet and booking an appointment. The approach begins with genealogy.

Before any design is discussed, Nunes requires a conversation about the person’s moʻokūʻauhau — their family lineage, their connections to place and ancestry, the significant people and events in their line. The design is developed from that conversation. It is intended to be a specific document, not a generic aesthetic choice: the shapes, their placement on the body, and their relationship to one another carry meaning established before a single mark is made.

The designs draw from the vocabulary of traditional Hawaiian visual culture: geometric interlocking patterns, shark-tooth motifs (niho manō), spearhead forms, references to specific natural elements associated with the wearer’s ʻaumakua (family gods), and compositional structures that encode the body as a map of identity. Nunes has described the right side of the body as carrying the spiritual protection dimension of a piece — solid, dense, black — while the left side carries the more biographical and genealogical information.

The alaniho — the first design Nunes himself received — runs from the hip to the ankle and remains one of the most significant designs in the tradition. It can take several different forms depending on the wearer’s family connections, profession, and rank. Other named design categories address the upper arms, the chest, the back, and the face; facial tattooing, historically the last and most senior of a person’s tattoos, remains rare and is treated by Nunes as the culmination of a long relationship rather than a starting point.

Each session is preceded by prayer. The session itself may include a chant. Nunes works with assistants — kaihoʻonaele — who stretch the skin and support the work, as was done traditionally. Clients lie on lauhala mats, the woven pandanus-leaf mats used in traditional Hawaiian material culture. The physical setup of the practice is not a concession to aesthetics; it is the protocol.

Access to Nunes’s work is selective. He has consistently refused requests that fall outside the parameters he considers appropriate — people wanting names tattooed, or images of unrelated things, or designs applied purely for decorative purposes. His apprentice Keliʻiokalani Mākua said in a 2021 interview:

“What we do is specific, and where it came from was specific.”

In 1990, Nunes established Pāuhi — the traditional Hawaiian tattooing school, based in Wai’anae on O’ahu’s leeward coast. He describes Pāuhi as having existed since 1990, practising hand-tapping (kā ana ka uhi) since 1996, and being formally titled since 2001. The school operates out of the Hale Ola Hoopakolea building in Wai’anae, where Nunes has worked for decades.

Pāuhi is not a school in any commercial sense. Students — haumana — are invited, not enrolled. Only a small number have been admitted over the school’s decades of existence. The training is extensive: it begins with tool-making, which alone can take years; advances through design study and genealogical knowledge; and culminates, for those who complete it, in ʻūniki — a formal ceremony marking the passing of knowledge that is itself a significant ritual event.

Of Nunes’s students, two have completed the ʻūniki in recent generations.

Nunes has been named one of the 101 Most Influential People in Tattooing by the late International Tattoo Art editor Bob Baxter. His work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa — institutions that treat it as significant material culture rather than a craft curiosity.

• In 2003, he featured in Skin Stories, the PBS documentary on Pacific tattooing traditions.
• In 2014, he was the subject of Na Loea: The Masters — Ancestral Ink, a documentary specifically on his practice and his role in the kākau uhi revival.
• In 2022, he featured in Skindigenous, the thirteen-part documentary series on indigenous tattooing worldwide, produced for APTN and broadcast on KPBS and other public media outlets.
• In September 2022, he applied a traditional Hawaiian head tattoo to actor Jason Momoa — a maka (face/head) tattoo that Momoa described as “a true honour 20 years in the making.” Momoa later served as creator, writer, and star of Chief of War, the Apple TV+ series about the unification of the Hawaiian Islands, released in 2025, for which Nunes served as a cultural advisor on tattooing. The series represents the largest-budget Hawaiian historical drama ever produced, with Nunes contributing the research and framework that governed how tattoos appeared on screen — their designs, placements, and cultural logic.

He has lectured internationally and consulted on major institutional projects, including a guest lecture at the de Young Museum in San Francisco titled E wehe ana i ka maoli (Uncovering What is Real) — Undressing the Savage, addressing the history of Hawaiian representation and misrepresentation in Western cultural contexts.

In 2020, Nunes moved to Thailand, where he is currently based. He continues to return to Hawai’i to lead workshops, teach, and visit. The ongoing work in Wai’anae is carried out by Hanohano and the Pāuhi community.

Nunes’s own position in Pāuhi‘s history is summarised in his Instagram (@suluape_keone) bio with characteristic economy:

“Pāuhi — traditional Hawaiian tattoo, in existence since 1990, kā ana ka uhi since 1996, titled since 2001.”

The revival he led was not a reconstruction from academic records. It was assembled from oral knowledge held by kupuna, from historical documentation gathered in colonial-era journals and artwork, and crucially from the living technical tradition that Su’a Sulu’ape Paulo carried. The Samoan and Hawaiian tattooing traditions share deep Polynesian ancestry, and Paulo’s role in giving Nunes access to the working techniques — the actual making and use of traditional tools — was the link that enabled a genuine technical revival rather than a machine-based approximation.

Nunes has been direct about what he understands the tattoos to do. They are, in his framing, a physical statement of identity that cannot be undone or taken away:

“Because once you put this tattoo on, there’s no denying who you are.”

In a community whose culture was systematically targeted and suppressed by American annexation, missionary activity, and the long displacement of Native Hawaiians from their own land, that permanence carries weight beyond aesthetics.