Where does the word "tattoo" come from?

English has two words spelled tattoo, and they have nothing to do with each other.

The older one is military. Etymonline records an earlier form, "tap-to," in the 1640s. Merriam-Webster traces it to the Dutch taptoe, from the phrase "tap toe," meaning roughly "taps shut." The signal called soldiers or sailors back to quarters at night.

Wordorigins.org dates an English example to 21 April 1643. Captain Jeremy Bucks, a Parliamentary officer in the Bristol garrison, reported being told that "The Taptow had beaten." The tattoo spelling shows up in the 18th century, while taptow lingers into the 19th.

One folk explanation, which Etymonline quotes from Barnhart, says police once visited taverns in the evening to shut off the taps of casks. Etymonline adds that the Dutch phrase seems to have had a figurative sense, roughly "say no more." The drumbeat sense is recorded in 1755, and the idle "devil's tattoo" of drumming fingers in 1803.

The second tattoo, the one on skin, arrived in 1769. Etymonline says the noun and the verb are both first attested in the writing of Captain James Cook.

Wordorigins.org gives the passage. Cook visited Tahiti in July 1769, and his journal begins: "Both sexes paint their Bodys." He records that the people call the practice Tattow. He goes on to describe black pigment made from the smoke of an oily nut burned instead of candles, pricked under the skin with a tool of bone or shell.

The source is a Polynesian word. Etymonline cites Tahitian and Samoan tatau and Marquesan tatu, meaning a puncture or mark made on the skin. Wordorigins.org gives the reconstructed Proto-Polynesian form as tatou.

Tattooing itself is far older than the word. Wordorigins.org notes that it goes back to antiquity and is not unique to Polynesia. Modern Western tattooing, though, traces to the eighteenth-century contact, and the English word came with it.

Before that, English had other names for the practice. Etymonline lists "Jerusalem cross" from the 1690s, for marks on the arms of Holy Land pilgrims, and "Jerusalem letters" from 1760.