Selina Tusitala Marsh, a poet of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, and French descent, was appointed New Zealand Poet Laureate in 2017 — the first Pacific Islander and the first woman of colour to hold the position. Marsh's poetry consistently engages with Pacific tattooing traditions, particularly Samoan tatau and Māori tā moko, as forms of embodied cultural memory and decolonial self-inscription. Her work represented a landmark in the formal recognition of Pacific literary culture and its deep engagement with body art as a primary vehicle of poetic and cultural meaning.

Marsh's Poet Laureateship marked the entrance of Pacific body art traditions — and the literary values they embody — into the heart of New Zealand's official literary culture. Her collection Tightrope (2017) and her advocacy for Pacific literatures have helped bring Samoan and wider Pacific tattoo traditions into mainstream poetic discourse, demonstrating that body modification and its literary meanings are not peripheral but central to contemporary poetry's engagement with identity, ancestry, and decolonial practice. Her work is a landmark in the literary integration of body inscription and poetic inscription.