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The puhoro or peha (pe’a in other Polynesian traditions) is like no other tattoo.

Covering the central third of the body, it is both large, and intimate.

Receiving it forces an intimacy between the moko artist and the recipient.

Its design and inking requires the recipient to be mostly, or fully, naked, to contort his body into many different positions to give the artist access to all the skin that must be inked.

It requires the artist’s hands and forearms to rest on the recipient’s body, to touch his body in places where he would not normally be touched outside of an intimate encounter.

Phil went out of his way to tell me that he and his wife have had gay roommates, that his brother had come out to him, which didn’t bother him at all. Went out of his way to make clear he had no issues working on a gay body, that he was comfortable with this level of intimacy with a gay man, without actually saying that.

And that helped me, too, be comfortable with the level of physical intimacy this moko requires.

Receiving this moko is not sexual, but it draws attention to the most sexual parts of my body.

Like manscaping, or choosing underwear, the puhoro frames and packages the genitals and the butt for presentation and display.

We all like to look in the mirror and see ourselves as attractive. We like, even need, to see ourselves as sexually desirable. To embody our sexual selves, to have an internal sense of our sexiness and sensuality, which translates into the way we move through the world.

This sense of myself as desirable—and as manly sexual—was severely diminished for me as a result of early childhood sexual abuse. Which forced me into a passivity that undermined my sense of masculine power, and which contaminated sex with fear, made sex a fraught and difficult terrain for me. Made it difficult for me to see myself as sexy, to live in the world with an embodied sense of sensuality.

So the puhoro, for me, in addition to being a reclaiming of my body for myself, a proclaiming of my own masculine sexual power, is also a packaging of my sexual parts as a way to increase my inner sense of sexiness.

In that way, this puhoro is an explicitly sexual tattoo for me, perhaps, to one degree or another, for all who receive one.

As such, the details of its packaging and presentation of my genitals and ass—outside of any other design considerations—is of paramount importance.

I couldn’t really articulate this at the outset. Perhaps because I hadn’t yet articulated it for myself, but also because there is a way you have to deny the sexual content of the puhoro—or at least I did—as a way to make the receiving of it not a sexual experience. When someone has his hands all over your mostly naked body, in its most intimate places, it is hard to be talking out loud about how this moko works sexually.

Phil and I got there in the end. Once he was done drawing in detail the design Rangi sketched on my butt and lower back, he took photographs of me, so I could see the design, and so he’d have a record for us to refer to when he inks it in the future. He wanted a shot from the back without the posing strap, so none of the design was obscured. I stepped out of it without hesitation. He’d seen me getting into and out of the posing strap before. And I said, “why don’t you take photos of the puhoro from all angles on my naked body,” which he’d certainly at least glimpsed before. Just like Mark, who’d been photographing the puhoro on my naked body from the outset.

Completely relaxed Phil took those photos, and we talked about the design, for instance the amount of white space under my butt and whether that should be reduced. Phil talked about how we might modify the design, move it over a bit to better line up with my butt crack, which veers to my right at the top. I don’t even know when, or how, that happened. We had an explicit discussion of how the deign frames and presents my butt!

I’m sure when I come back to have it inked in, Phil and I will maximize the puhoro’s sexual presentation of my ass.

I wish we’d gotten here sooner. There are ways I would have changed the front design, above my genitals, had we had a chance to talk about it, before it was inked. As it was, we modified the front design to better suit what I wanted, but we were limited by what had already been inked on my body.

Phil is a gifted moko artist in his own right, careful and precise in what he draws and inks, and he has been a good companion on this journey of mine.

Comfortable, I think, working on my body to achieve what I want, comfortable dealing with the puhoro on its sexual level, maximizing its impact on my internal sense of sexiness by making design choices to frame and enhance my junk and butt (at least, what’s left of it!).