Face Tattoos Carry Cultural Significance, Here’s How New Generations Are Continuing the Tradition Despite Stigmas

When people first glimpse Elu Aiyana, their eyes might be drawn to the face tattoos inked in the center of her forehead and descending from chin to neck. But when she appears on my screen, tousled curls and wonky pixels distort the finely etched lines as she explains their significance. “I’ve been between both worlds,” the 27-year-old Portugal-based tattoo artist tells Teen Vogue of her transition from the Western tattoo industry to preserving more traditional tattoo art.

Face tattoos are often associated with Soundcloud rappers, who have become prolific for using them to stake a claim in their identity, establishing themselves on the social media map to build a music career. However, Elu’s work in the tattoo medium is about reclaiming generations' worth of stolen identity and reinvigorating an art form that was established many lifetimes ago.

“All my life, I’ve had the split of [living] somewhere different from where all my lineage has been,” Elu says. Her family fled genocide, escaped Turkey, and settled in Germany, where Elu was born. Her Kurdish roots have always felt dug up and exposed to the elements, never sitting in the right soil or tended in the right climate. But shifting from tattooing with machines to now reviving the Kurdish art has been invaluable. “There’s nothing physical, no books. There’s not much I can physically learn about my culture,” she says, “I had to rely a lot on spiritual connection.” Traditional tattooing is about more than ink going under the skin, she explains. There’s more happening in that moment than we can perceive in 2D.

“Our bodies are like a temple, and we decorate and adorn our temples and give offerings,” Elu says. “It’s a form of self-expression, it’s a form of identification, but mostly for me it’s a form of communicating with my ancestors.” Facing a lack of concrete, written information pertaining to her culture, she relies on the symbols in Deq as a pseudo-language. “It’s symbology that relates to nature, to the cosmos, to humans themselves,” she explains. “I think it’s the ancestor of language, the way we communicated before we had languages.” Intensive research into old Kurdish symbols led her closer to her identity. “It feels like calling me home.”

Oriini Kaipara, a news anchor from New Zealand, made global headlines last December when she became the first woman with moko kauae, a traditional Māori chin tattoo, to present the prime-time news. It was a giant stride forward for indigenizing media, considering the lens through which mainstream news is delivered — and it resonated over 10,000 miles away in Portugal, landing on Elu’s news feed. But it also hit home for Taylor-Rose Terekia, a 24-year-old Māori content creator from New Zealand, whose own moko kauae was only weeks fresh when Oriini fronted the Christmas Day bulletin.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t have anyone in my whānau, any role models that I saw on the regular. You don't see it in the media or anywhere, who wore moko kauae,” she tells Teen Vogue. What was once a flourishing tradition had become a feature of old paintings in museums. But she was raised with the notion that one’s moko is always there beneath the skin, dormant and invisible, until an artist brings it to the surface in interconnected swirls and lines.

“It feels like a huge deal to know that your nieces, nephews, your kids, and your cousins can all look up to you and visually see and be reminded that we are Māori and that this is theirs as well,” she says. She received her moko alongside her sister and mother, who accompanied her on this unforgettable spiritual journey. “That’s three more wāhine with moko to go out and change the world and change people’s perspectives on moko.”

Where Elu and Taylor-Rose, and on a larger scale their Kurdish and Māori identities, converge is that their face tattoos are proof of survival. Moko kauae has survived decades of entrenched racism (and misogyny) where colonial systems operated to make women question if they were Māori enough to receive their moko, or if they had reached a certain level of Māori language proficiency to truly “count” as Māori. It is her birthright.

Kurdish tattooing, though not as common as it once was, is still practiced by elders. Deq is seeing a renaissance, in part because of Elu’s mission. The Kurdish diaspora is spread far across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, among other places. But she can’t be everywhere and she can’t tattoo everyone, so Elu works with clients and creates unique Deq designs that they can have tattooed wherever they are.

Inquiring minds often want to know the meaning of cultural face tattoos, but divulging that truth is the prerogative of the wearer. Among videos of Inuit throat singing and kunik, TikTok creator Shina Novalinga shared her journey of receiving face markings as an Inuk woman. Several comments remind people that she doesn’t owe them an explanation of the meaning.

Taylor-Rose’s Māori ancestors spent centuries as oral storytellers, and much of what is known today comes from tales passed down through family trees that now bear the fruit of young people seeking to preserve tradition. But in the case of face markings, sometimes there are stories that not everybody is privy to, like acknowledging the beauty of a book cover but opening to the prose and finding yourself unable to read the language.

There’s a word in the Māori language that means a close connection or feeling of kinship: whanaungatanga. It’s a concept that Taylor-Rose leans on when placing her culture in an international context. “I think Māori have always been at the forefront of pushing for Indigenous rights and issues,” she says. It’s a show of strength to other Indigenous people across the world, “to be able to normalize our culture and further progress our culture because they are watching and we help each other. We lift each other up when we succeed.”

That statement rings true for Elu. After spending time in Thailand and witnessing the thriving sak yant tattoo culture, she was spurred forward into her own awakening, researching any tradition she could link to her ancestry. The revival of Deq tattoo art brings her a sense of whanaungatanga in connecting with her kin, although she doesn’t know them. “It is something that brings us into unity,” Elu says, “Especially as people that are split into different countries, languages, dialects, and religions, it's really beautiful to see that this is something we can unify under.”

Of course, from symbols of gang affiliation or criminal history to rappers and pop stars clamoring for their place in the stratosphere, face tattoos, in general, are not free from judgment in the West. Elu says that even in the Western world when a rapper gets a face tattoo, there will be people that celebrate it, but also people that criticize it. “But even then at that moment,” she says, “It’s also a choice of the rapper to claim [their] own body, to choose to have that marking on [their] face forever.”

Little else demonstrates owning your identity like a traditional face tattoo. You become a walking poster child for your lineage. Deq was weeded out by a society that forced Kurdish people to view it as shameful, but it is once again a symbol of liberation. As Elu says, it’s the choice of a person to claim their own body and choose to wear that marking forever.

The right to speak the Māori language was beaten out of children at school in the 1940s. Decades later, Taylor-Rose translates K-pop songs into Te Reo Māori on TikTok. Elu notes that in Turkey, the Kurdish language has been severely repressed (its usage was illegal until the '90s, but it continues to be restricted and stigmatized.) Though both cultures sit at different points in their reclamation process, both women wear their ink with pride. That visual cannot be muted.

These are merely two stories of revitalizing culture and identity. There is more story and legacy, more history out there than could ever be written. We are not a monolith. Not all of us bear the inked markings of our ancestors, but we all carry the invisible markings of indigeneity — in the face of everything, persevering.

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