Toucan Tattoo Meaning
Boldness, color, expression, and the bold tropical statement.
In Amazonian Indigenous tradition, the toucan is a threshold bird.
Among the Desana of the Colombian Amazon, the toucan's beak is the instrument through which the shaman travels between the human world and the spirit world — the brilliant color marking the creature as belonging to both domains simultaneously, too visible for the ordinary world, too strange for the animal world. The toucan is the bird that cannot be hidden.
The beak is the fact of the toucan. It is larger than seems reasonable — up to half the bird's body length — and the explanation took until 2009: the beak is a thermal radiator. Blood flow through the beak's surface releases body heat in warm weather and is restricted to conserve heat in cool weather. The toucan regulates its temperature through its most outrageous feature. The thing that looks like pure display is doing essential work.
In Guaraní tradition of Brazil and Paraguay, the toucan feathers were worn by warriors and shamans as markers of status — the feathers that carried the most color commanded the most respect. To wear the toucan was to wear the evidence of the spirit world's contact.
John James Audubon painted the toucan in the 1820s and struggled with it — the bird looked artificial, he wrote, like something assembled from spare parts to be decorative rather than functional. He was wrong about the function. He was right that the toucan looks like a decision.
The toucan tattoo is the creature whose most excessive feature turns out to be its most essential one.
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