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The ugliness of tattoos
Body art has become a horror
Rishi Sunak devoted part of the last day of his doomed premiership to meeting Becky Holt, Britain’s most tattooed mother, on ITV’s This Morning show. Ms Holt was clad in a bikini which revealed much of the 95 per cent of her body surface that is covered in tattoos. After the brief encounter, she told OK magazine that the PM had been ‘really, really polite’ and had merely inquired how much her tattoos had cost.
During the 20th century and earlier, British tattoos were largely confined to sailors who had acquired them in foreign ports. A discreet anchor or mermaid etched on to a matelot’s beefy forearm were about the only examples of the tattooists’ art to be seen on our streets. My father claimed that a well-known admiral had the tattoo of an entire fox hunt – hounds, horses and all – galloping majestically across his back and nether regions. Be that as it may, it is undoubtedly true that tattoos were an exotic and rarely seen addition to the rich tapestry of life in these islands, associated with Britain’s history as a leading maritime power. But then, as the 21st century dawned, that all changed.
Perforating the skin with pigments for decorative or other purposes is a very ancient art: the oldest known example of a tattooed person, the man known as Otzi, whose perfectly preserved body was found high in the Alps on the Austrian-Italian border in 1991, lived some 3,330 years ago in Neolithic times. Tattooing reached its zenith among the Pacific cultures of Polynesia, where the people used tattoos for military and religious purposes, as well as in marital rituals, and the tattoo achieved astonishing levels of elaborate beauty. In Europe, the practice acquired a rather more sinister reputation when the Nazi SS used tattoos to number their victims in the death camps of the Holocaust, and tattooed their own recruits with their blood groups.
I encountered tattoos up close and personal in 2016 when I took what was billed as an erotic holiday at an isolated villa camp in the mountains of Andalusia, where enforced nudity was the order of the day. The camp was run by a German couple, and the lady of the house had a rather lovely pattern of roses tattooed across her voluminous breasts in vibrant red and green colours that must have been painful to acquire. By then, mass tattooing had taken off in Britain in a big way. Tattoo parlours had opened in every town and city, and their satisfied customers were proudly parading the results, which are especially noticeable in summer, when tattoos on arms and legs can be seen sprouting everywhere.
This being Britain, the fashion for tattoos soon took on dimensions of class, and while modish middle-class ladies contented themselves with a discreet ankle tattoo, working class heroes like David Beckham went public with every available inch of their body surface decorated with the tattooists’ art. Tattoos appeared in the most surprising places. I once had a close encounter with a woman who had her last lover’s birth sign tattooed in a very intimate spot. Such displays of fidelity can have embarrassing results: what happens when you have DAVE or DAWN prominently tattooed, and then your relationship with them founders?
Tattoos tend not to age well. As the years go by, skins wrinkle, tastes change, and even the boldest tattoos begin to blur and fade. Those who use their flesh as message boards can be left stranded in time. Apart from the more obvious dangers of dirty needles leading to infections or blood poisoning, tattoos are often offensive on purely aesthetic grounds. Brits have never been known as a particularly visually aware or adept people, but the sheer uglification of public spaces by tattoos is reaching intolerable levels. Those who prowl the streets with hideous inky splodges crawling up their thick necks are not a pretty sight. These are not the picturesquely decorated heroes of Moby Dick or jolly Jack Tars with tales of Tangiers and Trafalgar: they are making a visual statement of their own crass stupidity. Modern mass tattoos do have one useful purpose, however: they silently tell us that the wearer is a moron without putting us to the trouble of speaking to them to verify that fact.
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