Of all the aspects of dating that make me grateful I came off the market when I did – ghosting, choking, sober socialising, facial hair like Brahms’s beard – it’s the spread of large-scale visible tattoos that makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of ’Nam.
Neck tattoos and sleeves were once either indicators of prison gang allegiances or the preserve of thrash metal bands and their fans. Although perhaps the most heavily inked man in rock is Travis Barker, drummer of pop-punk crossover tarts Blink-182. His whole head is tattooed, as is Kerry King’s of Slayer, who also has ‘God Hates Us All’ down his left arm.
Among Phil Anselmo of Pantera’s extensive body art is a portrait of himself as a demon with his now ex-wife riding an extending tongue. (Anselmo has previously had to apologise for making Nazi salutes and mouthing ‘white power’ at concerts, and for using the Confederate flag in their merch.) These are not the sorts of men you’d swipe right for.
But what was once deemed Not Safe For Work is now so ubiquitous that most Premier League footballers look like they’ve got a side-hustle in a chain of meth labs across the Midwest. Tattooed necks and sleeves are everywhere, even at Buckingham Palace – viz. David Beckham at the recent state banquet for the Emir of Qatar. He could have been on day release from HMP Wandsworth, with neck pieces sticking up above his wing collar and his tattooed hands – inked with Jay-Z lyrics, other doggerel and the numbers of various football shirts he’s worn – protruding from the sleeves of his tailcoat.
Tattooist Leonardo Blackbirds of Till You Die Tattoos in Birmingham (it sounds death metal; he’s actually a highly articulate and sexy-sounding, softly spoken Italian from Milan) confirms that he’s noticed many more people getting visible tattoos in the last ten years. ‘I’ve got customers who work in hospitals, in banks, police officers, all kinds of customers that you probably weren’t seeing ten to 15 years ago.’
Sleeves are his most-requested and are a major commitment, needing four to six day sessions of six hours at £500 per day – so upwards of £2,000 for the full sleeve.
He sighs when I ask if David Beckham is responsible for this uptake. ‘He’s heavily influenced tattoo culture since the early 2000s, but at the time, we didn’t exactly hate him, but the fact that he made that style of tattoo – the angels, loads of black and grey, that I don’t like – very popular and very requested… it was a bit boring in terms of being a tattooist and trying to do something different.’
Leonardo thinks that most of his younger clients have been influenced by singers. I suspect the wetter end of the spectrum is at play here: Zayn Malik, whose tattoos have increased exponentially since leaving the boy band One Direction, and Ed Sheeran, whose terrible technicolour body art includes a lion across his chest.
The services have had to change their policy on tattoos because recruits are so heavily inked. Army regulations now state that tattoos on the back of the hand and neck are OK, ‘however most soldiers keep their saluting hand clean out of respect’. Whatever would Monty have said? Even the RAF has had to relax its stance (though stricter than the Army and Navy), to ‘continue to be representative of the modern-day society we service’.
I’ve no objection to trained killers sporting menacing tattoos; indeed, it may be advantageous when Putin rolls into Poland. But elsewhere, particularly in clinical environments, they can feel incongruous, inappropriate or just plain icky.
Most Premier League footballers look like they’ve got a side-hustle in a chain of meth labs across the Midwest
In the past few months, I’ve sat in an expensive white-and-chrome private dentist’s surgery, looking at the hygienist’s spectacularly bad sleeve art instead of Sky News during my appointment. They looked like they’d been done with blurred Biros. And a paediatric physio struggled to get my five-year-old daughter to focus on her exercises; she was so busy gawping at the Disney princesses on the therapist’s leg sleeve.
This is part of the problem: a lot of tattoos are bad. Remember the dolphin on Sam Cam’s ankle? Getting what used to be called a tramp stamp was as much a rite of passage as getting your exam results and going to Reading Festival; most of my friends who did so have since gone under the laser.
Leonardo won’t tattoo visible places unless the client already has them on their body, ‘Because in ten years they might realise that it was a mistake and I don’t want to be remembered as a mercenary – I have ethics!’ Some of his work is spectacular – he’s into traditional American and Japanese tattoos – but says, modestly, ‘I don’t know if it’s art’. I tell him I once knew a Japanese girl with a dragon back piece that looked spectacular in a backless dress. But on freckly, Caucasian skin, it would, frankly, look a bit shit – and probably invite accusations of cultural appropriation. As should all those Celtic bands and symbols sported by people who’ve never been further west than Wrexham.
If you are contemplating a tattoo as part of a middle-class mid-life crisis, I’d suggest going to a proper draughtsman like Leonardo. Just be aware that neck tattoos still freak most people out – though as my friend Alice discovered, after forgetting to remove a fake one from a Halloween party, they have their uses. ‘A neck tattoo is a magic talisman to repel chatty strangers,’ she recalls. ‘It was like I had a new superpower. I decided to test the limits by making eye contact and smiling at people – if anything, it made them retreat further.’
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