How to get rid of your saggy tattoo

Sagging angels, wilting lilies, drooping lines from love sonnets, withered swallows, flaccid snakes, limp dragons, shrivelled babies’ names: this will be the view inside the British bathroom, and at the British seaside, and in British hospital beds and morgues, in 2060, when today’s tattoo-wearers now in their prime will be in their seventies and eighties. 

None of us thinks we’re going to grow old, but (as happened so cruelly to 1960s rock stars) age will creep up, and the skin will stretch, even that of the handsomest, healthiest tattoo trendsetters with the best body art money can buy.

One such is David Beckham, whose four birds flying up from the floral foliage on his neck towards his left ear and on towards the mini-solar system on his head we gazed at while watching the Beckham four-parter on Netflix, aware that those were just a tiny fraction of the 80 or so tattoos covering his torso and limbs, on which there is now hardly any space left. ‘I’m not even worried,’ Beckham said when asked what his tattoos will look like when he’s old. It will be fascinating to see if he keeps them when his neck gets scraggy. 

Tattoos have entered the mainstream, as showcased by the angels-and-saints-inked upper and lower arms of the new Precentor of Canterbury, Wendy Dalrymple, who displays them proudly in her official Church of England photo, wearing a sleeveless black clerical blouse. The Revd Alan Moss, Anglican priest in Walthamstow, otherwise known as ‘the Illustrated Priest’, thinks of his tattooed body as a living stained-glass window, telling the stories of the Bible to the public. 

Doctors, lawyers, bankers and the Met Police are regular customers among the increasingly middle-class and moneyed clients at my local parlour in Fulham, Ink’d.