To Tattoo or Not to Tattoo?

When I was a kid in the 60s, the only tattoos I was aware of were those on bonafide sailors, usually anchors, even in my children’s picture books and on TV’s Captain Pugwash. Also lowlife types often had ‘blue birds’ on their necks or ‘love’ and ‘hate’ on their knuckles or ‘mild’ and ‘bitter’ over their nipples (I must add, I led a sheltered life and didn’t seek out tattoo’d men to ogle, nor did they routinely flash their blue inked nipples at little boys, at least not this one anyway). I suppose that I was aware too of the phenomenon of ‘the Tattooed Lady’ as a fairground attraction. 

The Tattoo Parlour (why Parlour?) was in those days a seedy backstreet shop, only seen in seaside resorts or in backstreets near main railway stations – certainly not among the Butchers and Greengrocers on the High Street. What was a little boy doing frequenting these areas, I hear you ask, I reply “no comment” as is my right. Strangely the neighbouring shop was often a ‘Religious Repository’ selling plaster saints, rosaries and gory/sentimental pictures that we Protestants always found vaguely amusing, and also at the same time a little bit sinister. 

Now, I must admit that I did (until I was about eleven and by then more mature) have a serious ‘transfer’ addiction and used my pocket money, or persuaded Mum or Aunties, to buy me sheets of transfers that I couldn’t wait to plaster my arms with – before being told at bedtime to ‘have a good wash and get that coloured muck off your arms now!’ It never occurred to me that transfers might be applied anywhere else except on my arms, we didn’t have such thoughts in those innocent days – no doubt because that’s where sailors had their tattoos, and little boys didn’t in those days want to look like lowlifes (or indeed like tattooed ladies). Do ‘transfers’ still exist, do TNC readers even know what they were/are? Have they joined the Junior Smoker Kits of candy cigarettes, chocolate pipes and sweet tobacco as ‘banned’ items? Probably not. By the way, those candy cigarettes were vile and the ‘chocolate ‘ pipes inevitably some sort of artificial chocolate, whereas the sweet tobacco (brown-dyed, extruded coconut) was the food of the Gods. 

Moving forward, my next conscious tattoo awareness moment was in the 90s, when it became uber-cool to have a band tattooed around the extreme top of the arm (barbed wire or Celtic designs were de rigeur). Like pierced ears, I managed to resist minor bodily mutilation in the name of fashion. 

Sometime after this (yes David Beckham, I’m looking at you) tattoos went mainstream and like TV before them launched into full technicolor. In idle moments, it has long been an ambition of mine to get rich by inventing an effective white tattoo ink, so that ‘people of colour’ don’t miss out so much by their inkings being quite difficult to make out. When exactly it became usual for ladies, even those without fairground ambitions, to get tattoos I’m really not sure. But as with their plastic talons, it’s caught on like wildfire. 

Now, I’ll readily admit that as a regular swimmer I do see perhaps more adult human flesh than others do. I’d say that easily two-thirds of my fellow aquanauts are ‘inked’ to some degree, from the dainty flowers on a lady’s ankle, incongruous and possibly in later years ill-advised loved-ones’ names, snatches of tacky inspirational poetry, through to ‘tramp stamps’, full leg designs and decidedly rough looking youths and men sporting angel wings on their backs. Other designs too numerous to mention also abound, strangely many with a religious theme. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three specific types of tattoos: 

(1) Those that really do exhibit some sort of artistic merit. 

(2) Those that are badly executed or are merely unimaginative clichéd images (praying hands always come to mind) chosen perhaps without real conviction from a brochure at the Parlour, because – well just because. 

(3) Those that, in all honesty, really do look like the random ‘transfers’ of old, or something drawn on with a biro (bizarrely often cartoon characters). 

Let’s be perfectly honest as we’re among friends here at TNC (although I fear may be alienating some), tattoos do not age well, especially the plain blue ones. Once skin loses the glow of youth and its natural elasticity, the colours fade and the once clear designs either sag among the hairy wrinkles/rolls of flesh, or become strangely stretched out of shape. What on a 20 year old may once have looked cool, on the middle-aged looks sad, and on an OAP faintly ridiculous. I sometimes wonder if people requiring major surgery now ask the surgeon to try and minimise damage to their bodily art works? 

In the name of research, I’ve asked people who I think won’t respond with a Glasgow kiss, “would you have had your tattoo(s) done today, if you didn’t already have them?”, the answer has, for me, always been a quite definite “No”. This of course leads me into another idle daydream of the riches I’d acquire if I invented a booth that a tattooed person could enter and by some mysterious process within, leave tattoo-less and without any scarring (probably though for many of my hordes of potential customers I fear only as a blank canvas for redecoration). What with this and my miracle white tattoo ink enterprise, I could even become a major political party donor. 

Let me end my diatribe with a joke. I can’t attribute it to the original writer, but admit it’s not me: 

“My ten year-old son never stops demanding, 24/7, that he wants a tattoo. We finally gave in and took him to the Tattoo Parlour, but they refused saying it’s completely illegal to tattoo a ten-year old – so we took him to the Gender Reassignment Clinic instead”. 

Well it made me laugh anyway. 

Martin Rispin has had a career in many different sectors, most lately in the fields of English Tourism and Heritage based Urban Regeneration. He now lives, retired, in Kingston upon Hull.

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