Tatau follows Kyle and Budgie, two twenty-year-old friends from London, who set out to travel the world. Before the trip, Kyle gets a Maori-style tattoo to celebrate their final destination: the Cook Islands. When snorkeling in a lagoon, Kyle finds the dead body of a local girl, Aumea, bound underwater. Returning to the lagoon with the police, Kyle finds that her body is missing. But Kyle knows what he saw. Desperate to discover what happened, Kyle and Budgie wake up deep and deeper into the myths, symbols and myths of the Maori. hallucinatory visions … until the full meaning of Kyle’s tattoo is finally revealed.