Shark Tattoos

What does a shark tattoo mean?

A shark tattoo means protection before it means danger. In the Pacific cultures that first put the animal on skin, the shark was an ancestor and a guide for canoes: in Hawaiʻi it could be an ʻaumakua, a family guardian, and Kamohoaliʻi, Pele's brother, led lost navigators home. The Polynesian row of shark teeth, niho mano, reads as protection, while in Māori culture a single mako tooth pendant marked rank. The open-jawed predator is the younger reading and arrived with Jaws in 1975. The mouth decides which one you wear: closed is the guardian, open is the predator. Species shifts it too, with the hammerhead seeing what others miss and the whale shark standing for conservation. Realism and black and grey, American traditional and Polynesian work are common, most often on the forearm or calf.

shark tattoo meaning