Tattoo

How to spell tattoo

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tattoo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tattoo mean?

1. nounA permanent design or word made by inking pigment into the skin.
2. verbTo mark the skin permanently by inking a design into it.
3. nounAn evening drum or bugle call signalling soldiers to return to quarters, or a ceremonial display of marching and music.

Tattoo in a sentence

• noun

  She booked an appointment to have a small tattoo added to her wrist.

• verb

  The studio refused to tattoo anyone under the legal age.

• noun

  The regiment performed a public tattoo on the castle esplanade each summer.

• noun

  The artist sketched the tattoo design before touching the needle to his arm.

• verb

  He asked the artist to tattoo the date along his forearm.

• noun

  The evening tattoo sounded across the camp, calling the troops back to barracks.

Where does tattoo come from?

Language of origin: Other

This single spelling actually hides two unrelated histories. The familiar 'mark inked into the skin' sense comes from the Tahitian (Polynesian) word tatau, which referred to a design pricked into the body, and which English sailors recorded after Captain James Cook's Pacific voyages in the 1760s and 1770s; the word entered English roughly at that time. The quite separate military sense, a drumbeat or bugle call summoning soldiers back to quarters in the evening, comes instead from the Dutch phrase taptoe, literally 'tap shut', the cry that told tavern keepers to close the taps and stop serving so the troops would return to camp. English absorbed that older sense in the 1600s and gradually softened taptoe into tattoo. The double letters in both directions, the two t's and the two o's, are the chief spelling trap, since the word offers no internal logic to anchor them. It is a neat coincidence that two words from completely different languages settled on the very same English spelling.

How the word is built

• tattoo (from Tahitian tatau, a mark made in the skin); also a separate sense from Dutch taptoe, 'shut the tap'