a Marquesan tattoo

Every time I entered a room and she was there, my face would break a smile and my imagination would take flight.

It started behind her ear and winded its way around her neck and down her back connecting to the symbols at the top of her lower back. The way she wore her clothes exposed most of it yet every day I longed for a glimpse of more. What was beneath the bands of clothing around her back and her hips? Would she wear a different top that exposed more of the mystery? Would the colour of today's skirt blend with the design? Did the 2 sections in fact become one when revealed? Was the pattern repeated or was there a surprise?

If exposed. I kept trying to figure out how I would photograph it ... blocking this section one way ... another section that way ... then as a whole... Would I shoot from overhead showing it as 2 dimensional or would it come alive if I shot through the valleys of her shoulder blades , her buttocks and her ribs?

I never asked her if she would pose.

I never even spoke to her.

Alas, I never saw the whole tattoo.

But, as with most fantasies, I revelled in my secret whimsy.

Easter Island

This is another place where your imagination can come into play. I seem to like those places.

Since there is no real written history of the islanders, it was left to the logs written by ship captains through the 1400's,1500's,1600's,1700's,1800's to keep track of the society and its peoples. Sometimes whern they arrived they would note all the MOAI were all face down; other times, say 30 years later, the next ship's log would report that they were all standing again. And yet we were told that to upright a fallen soldier was bad luck - it had fallen over for a reason. Records also state that tsunamis came along and struck down the statues as recently as 1960. At one site, the Japanese proposed a huge pantload of money to rebuild the AHU and resurrect the MOAI so Tongarirki is one of the best places to visit.

All the MOAI face inwards to the island. Why is this? Simply put, they did believe that they were the only people in the world for hundreds of years. Not a surpirse as it took us 4.5 hours to fly there from Santiago. But they thought any bad people were already on the island - not coming from the outside - so they erected them to face their neighbours.

Highly recommend a visit!