Tat's Entertainment

Everybody should get a stupid tattoo at some stage. It's the mark of youthful vanity, the feckless kid who lives in the ever-present rush, but later sees his aspirations smudging under the skin. Which is why I have a little laugh to myself when I see my initials inked on my upper arm. It really does look absurd.

Back in the day, it was fashionable to deface your parts with Indian ink. You simply fixed up a needle with a piece of thread wrapped along the side to act as a reservoir. Then you jabbed away until the mark was in. There was an outside chance of gangrene and septicaemia, but hey, we were hard.

I think it was in the summer of 1977 that we got our tattoos. It was a gang thing, but I was sufficiently middle class to put mine above the line of a T-shirt sleeve. Some of the other lads were filling up their forearms with the names of football teams and unsavoury organisations. The stickman outline of 'The Saint' from the TV show was another crap favourite.

Then again, tattoos were in the family line. My uncle Hammy had a massive eagle on his arm while his father had a lady in a flowing skirt, made from the Union Jack. My grandad had travelled the world with the Eighth Army, and I suspect that the skirt had been added later, to safeguard the woman's modesty.



Around the same time as I was getting my initials done, my cousin was putting BCR on her arm. A few years later she was getting married in a short sleeve dress and so was obliged to cancel her affection for the Bay City Rollers. A series of acid burns did the trick.

Occasionally, I think of covering my adolescent error with something proper. I've entertained the notion of a black rose, like the Thin Lizzy album cover from 1978. But the missus reckons it will merely look like a large bruise. So I've held off. And every summer, my children look at my fading letters with unaffected scorn. I deserve it.