Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied Cook on the Endeavour voyage to Tahiti in 1769, produced among the most detailed early European accounts of Polynesian tattooing, describing the tools, inks, ritual context, and aesthetic grammar of the practice. Banks's Endeavour journal entries, later published and widely circulated, provided European readers with their first systematic description of tattooing as a sophisticated cultural and artistic system rather than mere primitive disfigurement. His account helped establish tattooing as a legitimate object of Enlightenment natural-historical inquiry.

Banks's writings fed the late eighteenth-century literary fascination with Pacific cultures that runs through Anna Seward, Helen Maria Williams, and the broader culture of sensibility that engaged with 'civilised savagery.' His detailed descriptions of tattooed bodies contributed to the literary vocabulary of the exotic body that Romantic poets would mine extensively. Sydney Parkinson's illustrations made from Banks's expedition provided visual material that shaped how poets and writers imagined and described Polynesian humanity throughout the Romantic period.