Herman Melville's debut novel Typee (1846), based on his own captivity among the Typee people of the Marquesas Islands, placed Polynesian tattooing at the centre of its narrative and thematic concerns. The narrator's fear of being forcibly tattooed by the Typee priest Karky — which would render him unreadable to Western eyes — became a powerful meditation on the body as text, colonialism, and the limits of cross-cultural interpretation. Typee was an immediate popular success in both the United States and Britain, making tattooed Pacific bodies a mainstream literary subject.

Typee established the tattooed body as a major literary figure in American writing, directly influencing the treatment of Queequeg's 'hieroglyphic' tattoos in Moby-Dick (1851), where Melville described the harpooner's body as a mystical text 'a complete theory of the heavens and the earth.' This metaphor of the body as unreadable or illegible sacred book became enormously influential in American literature, reappearing in diverse forms in Whitman, Crane, and twentieth-century American poetry's engagement with the body as primary text.