John Butleron the outbreak of tattoos
I f experience is what you get when you don't get what you want, then I have benefited greatly from never getting a tattoo. Like most people, when I was younger I very badly wanted to get one. Quite a few designs caught my eye back in the day - a constantly fluctuating shortlist of logos and visual gags that I thought would define the essential me forever.
At one point a liver bird, the emblem of Liverpool Football Club, topped the list. Someone who had also been raised a Catholic in Ireland recently asked me what name I had chosen for my confirmation. I said I had taken Ian, and I was then forced to explain that this was the first name of my preferred moustachioed Welsh goal-scoring machine of the 1980s, Ian Rush. I still support Liverpool, but when I consider my confirmation name I'm glad I chose to illustrate my preference for that team in the form of an invisible third name rather than slashing it across my forearm with a needle, drawing blood and adding ink.
A few years after my confirmation, during a long summer of enthusiastic social drinking on a working summer holiday in the US, I thought about getting the logo of my favourite beer - a pugnacious cartoon wasp, smiling and wielding boxing gloves - on my arm. It's common for people to get names tattooed across their bodies: those of girlfriends, children or, in the case of hard-nut sailors with a keen understanding of irony, the word "Mum", possibly wrapped around an anchor. Not for me such foolish sentimentality. I was head-over-heels smitten with a type of lager. In mitigation, I was young, and drunk.
Other ideas on the list included "The Jam" in spray-paint style, the flag of Cameroon (don't ask) and the b-boy-in-cross-hairs logo from the album artwork of Public Enemy. Despite the fact that each of these designs would definitely help me get a lane to myself for the morning swim nowadays, I have few enough regrets about not crossing the threshold of the tattoo parlour.
No elephants parade around my bicep, trunk to tail. My neck remains unadorned by Arabic runes, and my ankle is dolphin-free. Walking around a large city in the sunshine recently, I got the feeling that by failing to summon the courage to get a tattoo in the first place - to distinguish myself from the masses - I have now been rewarded with a sense of individuality. In the lingo of the fashion world, not having a tattoo might be the new having a tattoo. We, the unpainted, are a new, hip minority.
It's the ex-con and the sailor I feel most sorry for. After all, when they got their tattoos it was to set themselves apart from the suits, the squares and the students. A swallow tattooed on the hand used to denote a well-travelled sailor or a hard man whose "fists would fly". A teardrop on the face used to indicate the death of a family member, mourn a person killed or show the amount of time a prisoner had spent in jail. In the US, Chicano gangs would identify themselves and pay tribute to their families in intricate skin-art murals.
These messages were being sent into the world quite clearly, and I for one was quite happy to read them before getting into a fight about who was next on the pool table. Even if your coins were sitting right there and your name was chalked at the top of the list, it was obvious that the guy with the teardrop tattoo who just came into the bar was next on.
They used to perform a kind of public service, but now that the message has been co-opted by hipsters, gap-year students and football players, it's nearly impossible for tattoos to communicate anything. The only person who has been able to say something with them recently is David Beckham, whose mis-spelled Hindi tattoo suggests he is a chimp of the highest order.
I was at a roller disco in Crumlin once. Needless to say, it was not yesterday, nor the day before that, but back in the days when tattoos really said something. This was the kind of place where it greatly benefited you to stay on your feet and far from the many surly skinheads hanging about the rink, espadrilles tattooed on their skulls and elbows.
To be in this place, to be on roller skates and to be bad at skating was an error of judgment on my part. But I was nine, and the skinheads were staying away from the dance floor. The occasion was for girls and young kids like me.
I was stumbling around the parquet floor like Bambi on ice, trying to figure the whole thing out, when the DJ put on Ghost Town. Suddenly the scene changed. The skinheads decided to let the wall support itself for once, and revealed themselves to be wearing skates, too, flying on to the floor en masse to show their appreciation of The Specials.
This is how you learn how to skate in a way that you never forget - with tattooed hard chaws rocketing past you on all sides, guys with Oi! tattoos on their skulls, with "hate" etched into both knuckles, skinheads daring you to stumble anywhere near them. You can wear roller skates and be menacing, after all. Who knew?
I have never since felt such focus as I did then, and in the course of one song I learned how to skate as deftly as Jon Heder in Blades of Glory. Mind you, I don't think I ever went back there. Those days have long since passed, and, thankfully, the only thing more obsolete than the roller disco is the tattooed skinhead and the message he sent through skin art.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com