Quality | 2010.04.19
How the tattoo went high street | Libby Brooks
A new film shows how the cultural role of body art has changed. While some new insignias may irk, I\'m still glad of mine
I can still remember the moment I began to appreciate the potentially subversive power of the tattoo. As a teenager, I acquired a copy of Julie Burchill\'s novel Ambition , the story of tough-talking hack Susan Street, who is promised editorship if she completes a series of challenges set by her newspaper\'s proprietor. I was hoping to pick up some tips on career development but, as the tasks unfolded, each one more outlandishly sexual than the last, I recognised that this would not be the case. What first alerted me that I was not in Judy Blume territory was the initial insistence that Street have the word "sold" tattooed just below her hairline.
Months after my adolescent probity had recovered from the lesbian orgy scene, I was still mucking about with my fringe in the mirror, wondering what it would be like to be permanently marked, and how you would go about hiding that humiliating brand. A little more than five years later, I got a tattoo of my own. In the late eighties, when Ambition was published, body art was still considered the preserve of the dangerous and the daring. Circus freak aficionados might parade their crazy coverage at specialist fairs but, in most people\'s experience, parlours were dingy, the designs basic and the act of tattooing mired in assumptions about social status. Norma Major didn\'t have a tattoo. Nor did Kim Wilde.
These days, tattooing is as high street as ear-piercing and, though Claire\'s Accessories has yet to offer the facility, it is just as easily accessed. The inked dolphin on the ankle of the current Conservative leader\'s wife is indulged as amusing evidence of her bohemian university days. Cheryl Cole\'s laser treatment to remove "Mrs C" from the back of her neck is reported as just another redemptive episode in the national sweetheart\'s saga following revelations of her footballer husband\'s infidelity.
A new documentary film Tattoos: a Scarred History , released last week, attempts to unravel why it is that while tattoos are now so commonplace as to be unremarkable, they are still deemed worthy of remark. And what it means that, in a culture where our bodies are considered more mutable than ever before, increasing numbers of people from all backgrounds are willing to brand themselves for life.
Though prohibited in both the Old Testament and sharia, tattooing prefigures all religious proscription. The earliest known example of body art dates back to the neolithic mummy Otzi the iceman , who was found to bear nearly 60 carbon tattoos. In many indigenous cultures, tattoos operated as a rite of passage, a mark of belonging, or a form of beautification. In western culture it\'s notable that despite – or perhaps because of – its association with otherness, body art fascinated the European gentry of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Queen Victoria was persistently rumoured to have had a tattoo, as was Winston Churchill\'s mother, Lady Randolph.
To some extent, tattoos are still used as a cultural shorthand for the outsider: witness Lisbeth Salander, the socially remote heroine of Stieg Larsson\'s Millennium Trilogy. But it\'s also arguable that the prevalence of Maori markings on Middlesex men has drained tattooing of all traditional significance. Body art has become a standard celebrity accoutrement, to be noted for its Hindi misspelling (thanks, David Beckham), its excess (sorry, Amy Winehouse) or the inked in haste, repented at leisure romantic debacles of everyone from Johnny Depp to Kerry Katona.
The art of tattooing has moved far beyond the sailor\'s blue swallow – a reminder of the first land bird mariners would see returning home. As Neil Dalleywater, editor of the body artists\' in-house magazine Skin Deep , contends, the decline in social stigma has prompted a peak in quality of execution, with more and more people requesting unique designs. Perhaps it\'s inevitable that, at a moment when the consumerist ethic tells us that fashion, hairstyles and makeup are at once utterly homogenised but also entirely change-worthy, according to our credit rating, permanence has prevailed. Costly laser surgery – while making a great tabloid headline – is the provenance of only the very rich, after all. And, in a society bereft of acknowledged rituals, to tattoo or not has become a rite in itself.
Because Britain is crap when it comes to talking about class, there is still some flotsam as far as tattoos are concerned. Thus, a discreet butterfly is graded far better than a so-called "tramp stamp" – referring to the recent appetite among young women of a certain echelon for a marking just above their buttocks.
I got my tattoo – which I do not hold Julie Burchill responsible for in any way – when I was 21, as a message to my older self. While I\'m occasionally irritated that whenever I show bare ankle I must also reveal Celtic knotwork, in general I\'m glad of the permanent reminder of who I was then and what my hopes were for now. Perhaps I\'ll think differently when the ink is cracked and faded under the support stockings. Samantha Cameron probably feels the same, though we haven\'t talked much since the election campaign began.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]eft-rituals-tattoo-rite-itself
