Samoan novelist and poet Albert Wendt published the essay 'Tatauing the Postcolonial Body' in 1996, offering one of the most influential literary-critical accounts of Pacific tattooing traditions and their relationship to postcolonial identity. Wendt argued that the tatau was a form of writing that preceded and exceeded European literacy, encoding genealogy, cosmology, and community in a language that colonial powers could suppress but not entirely destroy. The essay became a foundational text in Pacific literary studies and in the broader field of postcolonial body theory.

Wendt's essay established a theoretical framework for reading Polynesian tattooing as a literary and textual practice that was immediately adopted by Pacific and postcolonial poets and critics. His framing of the tatau as pre-colonial writing — a system of inscription with its own grammar, syntax, and archive — gave poets a vocabulary for asserting the literary legitimacy of indigenous body knowledge against Eurocentric definitions of text and literature. The essay's influence on Pacific poetry's engagement with tā moko, pe'a, kakau, and tatau as forms of ancestral literary practice has been enormous and enduring.