Inked
My first tattoo was the end of a long process and a long wait
I can’t remember when I first thought about getting a tattoo. Some time in my teens, most likely, when they were still caught on the cusp between scary and cool.
The scary ones you’d occasionally see about, their frequency often determined by what sort of pub you were drinking in. In my mind, they never looked fresh or crisp, were always faded to a blue-green smudge and blur. The few that were clear were those signs to stay away from someone, LOVE and HATE across someone’s weathered knuckles or a spider’s web on someone’s neck sandwich between a bomber jacket and a shaven head.
The cool ones, though, those were the ones that created the desire. I was a rock and metal kid, and the pages of Kerrang! and Metal Hammer would show us the dream life to go along with that era of glam and sleaze, an elaborate armful of tattoos part of the uniform that gave admittance to that LA life of late night jam sessions, debauched pool parties, Jack Daniels, motorbikes and impossibly glamorous women.
The dream was those elaborate multi-coloured artistic epics, inked by someone who looked as cool as the people they were working on in their effortlessly hip LA studio. The reality was a faded and crude bunch of flowers over a scroll saying MUM, done in a tattoo parlour down a…
