Cargo freighter despatched to Teahupoo as floating hotel for Olympic athletes will offer “first tattoo studio at sea”

The Aranui 5 will offer athletes the chance to be decorated with Polynesian-style tattoos based upon their life stories.

Last year, as Paris 2024 fever started to build, Games organisers announced Olympic athletes would not be staying in that pretty little town at the end of the road and would instead lodge in a floating hotel anchored just offshore. 

The Aranui 5, which makes a 12-day circuit of French Polynesia every month, has been described as “the Pacific’s strangest cruise ship” and “the weird offspring of a love affair between a cargo freighter and a passenger liner.”

It ain’t luxury by any stretch but a serviceable and pleasant enough joint to spend a couple of weeks on and necessary after a local Teahupoo hotel, which had been shut for 26 years, was unable be readied in time. 

Now, it can be revealed, the Aranui 5 will offer athletes the chance to be decorated with genuine Polynesian-style tattoos based upon their life stories after one of its massage rooms was repurposed into a floating tattoo parlour. 

The ship’s resident tattooist Eddy Tara averages fifteen tattoos a week and says,

“I first discuss with the client to find out what he’d like to represent. All the pieces I make are unique to the person wearing them. The tattoos tell their story, their experiences, and their feelings. But the symbols used are all the same. It is the symbols and placement together that tells the story. They tell their own story, like in a book that they’ll keep for life inked on their skin.”