Tattooed Zoë

Susie wanted tattoos from the age of five or six.  She also dreamt of being a biker.  By eighteen she had her first tattoo and by nineteen had four.  She just loves them and has many more now.  Next she plans a black backpiece composed of a lot of writing.  Her tattooist is Andy Barber in New Malden in London.  (www.andybarbertattooandpiercing.co.uk.)  She's got to that dangerous point now where she sees bare skin as a gap.  I wonder just how far she will go. And the bike?  Well that never happened.  As an adult she decided she was too clumsy to take that on.  Anyhow she is a nurse by profession and sees how risky being a biker can be.

Today Ben continued around my right leg with the second Burne-Jones picture and made a great deal of progress with the detail of the Faun.   The rest is in the barest outline.  With this in place he can also begin to work out how to join the whole piece up.

Compared with other work on my body this wrap around image is hard to show in one picture.  When finished I will post a series of images which I hope will convey the overall design.

I was on holiday in Malta these past few days and around the pool it was like a mini tattoo convention. In each of the next few posts I will feature people I interviewed and photographed. The first is Jenny from Stockholm.  She got her first tattoo at the age of fifteen.  She was inspired by her father, who had got himself a ship tattooed on him while in Denmark.  She saw it and nagged her parents until they agreed she could have one too.  She says she was generally precocious and thought I want tattoos in my life so got a Chinese sign for an elephant inked on her,  By eighteen she had her backpiece and in the twelve years that followed had the rest done..  Unusually on her right arm she has a fine picture of a former boyfriend and when they broke up, rather than getting a cover up she just had a large cross tattooed over it.  She doesn't want to get rid of it and says she would do the same with any future boyfriend.  The only problem would be if he objected to the existing phot…

Ross Warren and his partner Lisa were both waiting at Ben's as I finished my last session.  Ben is especially proud of Ross' backpiece and is keen to show it at the next big London convention.  Its American Indian influences were inspired by the Indian Ross already had on his arm.  That was there before coming to Ben.  For a while after his arm piece he wasn't at all sure he wanted to be heavily tattooed, but eventually he plucked up the courage and doesn't seem to regret that.  He'd been worried about how others might perceive him, when he stripped off at the beach or pool.  All the backpiece was done freehand except for the bottle.

Lisa has work on her too - on her stomach, leg and arm.  Her first tattoo she had when she was sixteen, so no inhibitions there.  She later had it covered.  Lisa served in the British army in Bosnia and Kosovo, so being tattooed probably required little extra courage on her part.

Both of them live in the Bradley Stoke area of Bristol.