“Oh, of course I’m obsessed,” says Robert Lahr with a wide grin. “It’s an addiction, clearly it is. If you come to a place like this, it’s the sound, the smell – that’s what gives you the kick.”
The place in question is a large exhibition space in east London, where for three days this weekend, tens of thousands of Lahr’s fellow tattoo enthusiasts are gathering for a festival of ink, the London Tattoo Convention.
To the low background hum of countless, buzzing machines, the event’s opening morning sees scores of early arrivals rolling up their sleeves, contorting themselves across tables or dropping their trousers to expose various sections of flesh to the needle. Others stand to watch or flick through catalogue books for something particularly inventive or original that they might copy on themselves.
Having had a large rose tattooed on his shaved head just a month or two ago, Lahr, who had travelled with a friend from Luxembourg to attend the event, was determined that this trip was just to watch – but who knew? He still has some “clean” skin, after all, on his upper legs, back, face (under a large bushy beard) and the palms of his hands.
Lahr works for the Luxembourg government, and so he asked permission before he got his first discreet inking 13 years ago (“Something tribal,” he says, then laughs apologetically. “It was the early 2000s.”) A head tattoo, however, showed real commitment. “It’s really telling other people that you don’t care what they think about you. ‘Don’t judge me negatively, because I don’t care.’”
Tattoos, it scarcely needs to be said, have come some distance since they were found principally on old sailors’ biceps and the smudgy knuckles of nightclub bouncers. One in five adults in the UK have now gone under the needle, according to a YouGov survey last year, rising to 30% among those aged 25-39. Half of those aged 18 to 24 have actively considered getting one.
Earlier this week, Acas, the conciliation service, said negative attitudes were outdated and employers risked missing out on the best staff if they discriminated against those with conspicuous inkings.
And yet, such attitudes have not gone away. The same YouGov survey found that 36% still think negatively of people with tattoos. David Dimbleby adorned one shoulder with a small scorpion three years ago at the age of 75. Margaret Mountford, Alan Sugar’s former sidekick on The Apprentice, probably spoke more representatively for establishment attitudes when she said this week: “There are swaths of the workplace where it is simply not appropriate to be greeted by a young person with a tattoo.”
“I think in general, when you go for jobs these days they don’t have a problem with it,” says James, attending with his girlfriend, Sophie. He is a web developer, she works as a manager in a coffee shop, where a ban on visible sleeve tattoos was recently relaxed. Neither, however, wanted to give their second name, and all four of his inkings – the first of them a Metallica logo to commemorate his first-ever gig at the age of 17 – are well hidden. “I think it was a decision not to make it visible because of work,” he admitted with a shrug.
It is not only changing attitudes that have fuelled the boom in tattooing, according to to the event’s organiser, Marcus Berriman (“When I got my first tattoo 35 years ago, it was basically a mark in the skin. And you couldn’t even spell hygiene.”) Advances in needle technology and new, high quality inks have greatly expanded what is possible for a skilled artist. A tattooist’s repertoire that once stretched to anchors and skulls, can now include immensely intricate, photo-realist designs. If you want to have a highly realistic picture of your new baby’s face tattooed on your cheek, in other words, there is nothing to stop you.
In a corner booth, Lianne Moule from Immortal Ink in Chelmsford, one of a significant number of female tattoo artists represented at the convention, was bent over the upper left arm of her customer Amanda Rhodes, carefully shading in green the corner of what will become a crow surrounded by leaves and cherries, the continuation of a very large design that she has already inked across the entirety of Rhodes’s back.
In her other life, Rhodes works as a controller at the National Air Traffic Control Centre in Swanwick, Hampshire. As such, she says, many of her colleagues know her only by the sound of her voice. “I don’t think they realise that I am someone with reddish purple hair and quite a lot of visible tattoos.”
This latest design is “probably a four-day job”, according to Moule, but Rhodes has booked in at the studio monthly between now and April. Won’t they have finished by then? “Oh, I’ll probably find something else to have done,” she says with a large smile. “I’m a work in progress.”
