Star Trek: 10 Things You Never Knew About Chakotay
2. Tattoo Was A Way For Robert Beltran To Explore Chakotay And For Michael Piller To Prove A Point
The second season episode Tattoo sees Chakotay encountering the aliens who inspired the legends of his peoples' Sky Spirits'. For Robert Beltran, this episode got better and better on each rewatch. He felt that the script explored not just Chakotay's past, but also his love of ecology and spirituality as well.
The flashback scenes that included his father, Kolopack, were also essential in deepening the character. This was part of what Beltran described as a triumvirate, along with Initiations and Maneuvres, of really excellent episodes. Behind the scenes, Michael Piller was having a very different take on this story.
Tattoo was, for him, an experiment in pacing. He felt that Voyager had ground somewhat to a halt by this stage of the second season, so he saw this script that had gone through several rejections and rewrites as the perfect way to get the plot moving again. He handed in a screenplay that contained somewhere up to 200 scenes, then whittled them down. The A story of Chakotay's discovery came out the best, while the B story of the Doctor dealing with the flu guaranteed a few laughs as well.