American tattoo artist Jake Sawyer (Jason Behr) explores and exploits ethnic designs from around the world. At a tattoo expo in Singapore, he glimpses the exotic world of traditional Samoan tattoo (tatau) in the work of the fiercely proud Alipati (Robbie Magasiva). Fatefully, Jake is attracted to Alipati’s beautiful cousin, Sina (Mia Blake).
When Jake impulsively steals an ancient Samoan tattooing tool, he unwittingly unleashes a powerful angry spirit. Suddenly, his art takes on a frightening new dimension, exposing everyone he touches, including the feisty Singaporean Victoria (Caroline Cheong), to mortal peril.

Sensing the solution can only lie with the Samoans; Jake follows them to Auckland, where he runs into an old adversary, tattoo artist Crash (Michael Hurst) and a new one, the respected Samoan elder Aleki Va’a (David Fane).

His investigation takes him on a devastating journey into the dark heart of Pacific mysticism. There, Jake must recover his own soul if he is to save the woman he loves and escape with his life.

Jason Behr was attracted to the role of Jake by the fresh ideas in the story: “It’s set in the Samoan spirituality arena and it’s dealing with things that I've never come across, and that was a great drawcard for me. As I read the script I thought it was exciting and it had an element of fear coming from things I was not familiar with. Everything was very new and fresh and that’s great. When you’re telling a story about fear and ghosts and spirits in a world which is all new to your audience, it can be one hell of a ride.”

Behr says his character, the tattoo artist Jake, “was considered to be the rock star of the tattooing world until about two years ago. He got there by stealing someone else’s design, so he fell on hard times and didn’t really live up to the expectations that everyone put on him, and he’s now just using tattoos as a way to make money. He’s been reduced to travelling around picking up what he can from other cultures and working at these tattooing expos, giving people McTattoos. It’s a sort of fast food tattooing where he just gets somebody in the seat, tattoos them, and then gets them out. He’s a rambler, a take-life-as-it-comes kind of guy. All he has is the shoes on his feet and the shirt on his back and he goes where the wind takes him.”

That’s how it was for Jake until his chance encounter with the Samoan tattooists, when he reflexively steals the tattoo tool and sets in motion a horrifying chain of events which forces Jake to confront his own values and wake up to life.

The Tattooist is a fascinating supernatural thriller, the story of an outsider, an American tattoo artist who unwittingly unleashes an angry Samoan ghost. Everyone he tattoos becomes taken over by this spirit. Unfortunately, he also tattoos the woman he is falling in love with, and the film takes the audience on a mysterious, scary and thrilling journey into the supernatural world.

Director Peter Burger was excited by the opportunity to create a spine-chilling environment with tension escalating throughout the film. “It’s scary in a ghostly kind of way. It’s a world in which ghosts exist and tattoos can come to life and creep out and totally consume a person’s skin. I really enjoy working in a world where extreme and freaky things happen to people and this script was so well written and so visual that I loved it and thought it would be a whole lot of fun to make.

“It’s a supernatural thriller. Supernatural because the key figure is a ghost and it’s a thriller because it’s also a detective story with clues delivered along the way. Jake has to follow them and the audience goes with him as he figures out what’s going on. And these two elements, the spirit and the detective story come to a head in the climax.

“What makes it different is that Jake finds himself in a completely new environment because it’s a Samoan ghost and so he leads us into this new world of Samoan people living in Auckland.”

Even though, as Burger says, “it can never be the real world: it’s the movies”, the underlying theme of this movie is very real in Samoan terms, as Samoan cultural adviser and orator chief Pa’u Tafaogalupe Mulitalo (Tafa) explains: “There's a term in Samoan called lama avea. When a person steals something from a tattooist like an implement, a design or a title or when a tattooist performs without the proper traditional Samoan cultural franchise, the term lama avea applies. It means that his art has been cursed. So because Jake steals a tool from the Samoan tattooist Alipati at the Singapore tattoo convention, every new work that he does becomes lama avea. The evil spirit, the ghost of the art of tattooing, has gone through the tool to make the recipients of Jake’s tattoos the victims of the curse.”