The traditional Hawaiian tattooing practice of kakau — which had been largely suppressed following the arrival of Christian missionaries in the early nineteenth century — underwent a deliberate cultural revival in the 1990s and 2000s, led by practitioners such as Keone Nunes who trained in traditional Polynesian hand-tapping techniques and worked to reconstruct the iconographic and ritual context of traditional Hawaiian body art. The revival formed part of the broader Hawaiian cultural renaissance (Hawaiian Renaissance) that had begun in the 1970s, encompassing language, hula, and navigation. Kakau revival reconnected Hawaiian body practice to its Polynesian ancestral traditions.

The Hawaiian cultural renaissance that included the kakau revival profoundly influenced Hawaiian literature and poetry, generating a body of writing that used traditional body practices as metaphors for cultural survival and decolonial identity. Poets such as No'u Revilla and Haunani-Kay Trask wrote within and about this renaissance, treating the revived kakau as a form of embodied ancestral memory — literally re-inscribing indigenous identity onto bodies that colonialism had tried to erase. The intersection of body modification and Hawaiian poetic identity became a central concern of contemporary Pacific literary culture.