London - Helen Mirren’s had one for years. Daniel Craig has a Peruvian condor on his right shoulder. Samantha Cameron’s got a dolphin just below her shapely ankle. Jude Law has a circle of ants on his inside right arm. Anna Kournikova’s got a lovely sun symbol on her back, just above the knicker line (though, when asked about it, she told the press it was “a heat patch”).
English actress Felicity Kendal, aged 64, recently upset a Spectator writer when she announced she’d had a moon and two feathers emblazoned on her leg (he hinted darkly this indicated “a desire to hold desperately on to youth”).
Tattoos. They’re everywhere. Hardly a day goes by without someone in the public eye proudly revealing the Hindu love chant inscribed on their upper thigh or a Masonic symbol circling their navel.
The coolest model around, Freja Beha Erichsen (she’s had three Vogue covers this year), sports 15 tattoos on her lithe 1.8m frame - including a lightning bolt that starts around her fifth rib and heads south.
Daniel Radcliffe recently voiced his relief that, now he’s finished filming Harry Potter and is released from contractual restraints, he can go out and get tattoos. Last month Jennifer Aniston, America’s perennial girl-next-door, had the name of her deceased dog, Norman, scratched on to her right foot.
At civilian level, too, we could be forgiven for wondering what’s going on. Why have both my lawyer friend Dan’s two sons (18 and 20) suddenly gone in for those spikily tribal tattoos you associate with Tahiti and Mike Tyson’s face? How come the bloke in the bank, advising me about insurance, has a purple gecko crawling under his Tissot watch? And what’s the story behind the lady in the sweetshop who has a brace of angel’s wings and the word REDEMPTION tattooed in Gothic script across her upper sternum?
“Tattooing is definitely getting more middle class,” says Sion Smith, editor of Skin Deep, Britain’s best-selling tattoo magazine, which sells 20 000 in the UK and 46 000 internationally every month.
“Yes, it’s mostly bought by people who drive forklift trucks and say, ‘Hey, look at my tattoo’. But the most interesting letters we get are from surgeons who say, ‘I’ve been living for five years with this huge tattoo on my back and no one knows. I’d like to show it to you.’
“I was at a wedding last month at which the vicar had a tattoo. As for the full-arm tattoos, we get pictures coming in on headed paper from Barclays and HSBC. Bank officials - they’re the kind of people who are getting them done now.”
The shift in the cultural view of tattoos is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Tattoos were known as “chav stamps” - ineradicable physical evidence that the wearer was a member of the no-taste working classes. Tattoos worn by ladies are called “tramp stamps” in the US, and “slag-tags” by censorious folk in Britain. It’s as though the simple act of having a mark on your skin - any mark - makes you a vulgarian. When heroic British males such as Robbie Williams and David Beckham began to acquire multiple inkings in the 1990s, you could hear middle-class mutterings of “breeding will out”.
Footballers, cricketers, singers, actors and TV stars started to adopt biker-chic illustrations on their flesh. It didn’t make tattoos seem classy; but it made them seem cool. When Amy Winehouse appeared, the trashy girls tattooed on her arms were the quintessence of British proletarian sauciness.
When Vogue published an article in 2008 suggesting that tattoos were becoming ubiquitous and unstoppable among the posher classes - revealing, inter alia, that Emma Parker Bowles has a kitten tattooed on her bottom, and the artist Rachel Feinstein has a vagina snugly inked into her armpit - you knew the phenomenon was starting to move upmarket. And when last year the new British prime minister’s wife started showing off her epidermal porpoise, it became hard to convince the world tattoos are still the province of criminals and sailors.
The history of the tattoo is more complex and polycultural than you’d think, however. From Siberia to Italy, from Egypt to Japan, as much as 5 000 years ago, mummified corpses have been found with patterns inked on their skin (but no hearts or anchors, sadly, nor bannerswith the words “Mum” or “Born to Raise Hell”.)
It’s generally held that the Polynesians perfected the most complex and accomplished tattoos of the ancient world. The word tattoo comes from Tahiti and entered the English language in the captain’s log on Captain Cook’s ship, Endeavour: “Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible…As this is a painful operation, especially the Tattowing of their Buttocks, it is performed but once in their lifetimes.”
But so many sailors returned to England bearing tattoos, so many explorers came home with Polynesian tribesmen, to exhibit them as “painted savages”, that a counter-Enlightenment vogue for self-inked adornment began. By the 1860s, most British ports could boast at least one professional tattooist.
It was a vogue to which even royalty became attracted. In 1862, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, extended his arm and allowed a commoner to print a Jerusalem cross on his arm. Soon everyone was showing off their tats. His sons, the dukes of Clarence and York, got tattooed, 20 years later, by the Japanese maestro Hori Chiyo.
Winston Churchill is reputed to have had an anchor on his arm, and his mother a snake tattoo around her wrist (but concealed by a special bracelet); but for most of the 20th century, the tattoo was mostly the mark of lowlifes, footpads, sentimental matelots, circus sideshow folk, prisoners anxious to assert their identity, and gangsters avid to announce their loyalty.
“There’s two types of tattooed people,” says Smith. “The people who’ve got one small one, and that’s enough for them, and it lasts forever and they pretty much forget about it. And the other people, those of us who think, ‘I like this, I’ll build on it,’ and become serious collectors.”
Smith has had four tattoos done (upper arms, back and shoulders) and is very keen on a Montreal-based artist called Yann Black, who works under the appealing nom de guerre of Your Meat Is Mine. Black’s designs resemble, at their best, drawings by Miro and Picasso; and at their worst, psychotic scribbles (look at www.yourmeatismine.com).
Tattoo parlours used to be dingy, badly-lit establishments, populated by scary-looking bikers and friends of the management with bald heads and criminal records. Now they’re much more up-scale.
“There’ve been TV shows in America called LA Ink and Miami Ink which showed tattooing in very posh studios,” says Smith. “Once the public saw they were nice, friendly places, not dark hideouts, they felt getting a tattoo was suddenly a possibility. ”
Everyone will tell you how ill-advised it is to have your beloved’s name inscribed on your body. Jude Law must regret the time and pain he spent having “You came along to turn on everything, Sexy Sadie” tattooed on his arm. (And English actor Tom Hardy has the words “Till I die SW” on his abdomen. SW was his wife, Sarah Ward. He’s now engaged to the actress Charlotte Riley. Whoops.)
But otherwise, the only thing for the newly tattoo-bound to avoid is being a cheapskate. If you’re going to do it, do it properly.
“If you turned up at work with a tattoo,” says Smith, “some of your colleagues might be shocked. But if you went swimming tomorrow and showed one off, I don’t think anyone would say anything. It will come down to how good your tattoo is.”
You have to choose your parlour, choose your artist carefully from close perusal of his, or her, “flash racks” or displays of work. And be prepared to shell out.
“Put it this way,” says Smith. “If you’ve got a horseshoe the size of a 50p piece on your ankle, then people may label you, unfairly, as cheap.
“But if you have a back piece done, which has obviously taken someone days and cost you hundreds or thousands of pounds, people will be awestruck. They’ll say, ‘I think I’ll get one of them, because it’s a perfectly formed piece of art.’”
Indeed. Go for it, chaps. Don’t think - get some ink. - The Independent