![]() Fearne Cotton has 11 (‘not that my mother knows’).Īngelina Jolie is apparently 12.3 per cent tattoo – the woman has more tattoos than she has children, including one ‘magical Pali incantation written in Khmer’ (oh, how my half moon pales). Athletes have them, musicians have them, Olympians have interlocking rings, the cast of Lord of the Rings all have the word ‘nine’ in Elvish script. Today, you can’t play premiership football without a pair of tattoo sleeves. ![]() It’s designed to convince yourself that life is somehow more edgy than it really is. Having a tattoo is like talking mockney or wearing a trilby. Since then, of course, tattoos have become both commonplace and cool, although they retain that mildly anarchic, low-rent attitude which gives people like me – safe, middle-class people with trampolines in their garden and dijon mustard in the cupboard – a bit of a thrill. My mother, mostly – despite me mentioning that Winston Churchill had a tattoo (an anchor on his arm, like Kate Moss). Back then, a tattoo still elicited a ripple of purse-lipped disapproval among certain types. Someone on the street outside was selling deep-fried cockroaches, and I wondered if eating a handful would be a better way to spend an evening.īut that was 15 years ago, and I’ve loved it to bits ever since. He worked by the light of an oil lamp and I have a half moon on my shoulder, inked there years ago by a gnarled old stick of a man in a back-street parlour in Bangkok. It’s not very obvious unless I give somebody a little showing. ‘It was very liberating,’ she later remarked, ‘because it was proving that you’re never too old to do mad things. Or one of those weird hip-hop eyebrows shaved into freaky stripes. She could have gone for a tongue piercing, I suppose. This is what Lady Steel, fragrant wife of former Lib Dem leader David, did lately to mark her 70th birthday. These days, growing old disgracefully requires something altogether more dramatic…like a large pink jaguar tattooed on your shoulder. When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple with a red hat that doesn’t go…’ So says the poem by Jenny Joseph, written way back in 1961 when it was quite scandalous to wear colours that clashed.
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