Fashionable and cool — or aids to spiritual enlightenment? Malu van Leeuwen investigates Capetonians’ penchant for tattoos
`TATTOOS Get You Sex” boasts a T-shirt walking around Cape Town. It’s an old gimmick, using the promise of sex to market the product. But there’s life yet in the tired cliche — because whether it’s piercing or tattooing, Capetonians are indulging in skin art as if there was no tomorrow.
Not that Cape Town is the tattoo capital of the world, or that the practice itself is a new one. Clit rings, punctured tongues and inked flesh are no longer the exclusive turf of machismo or the seriously hardcore.
“It used to be very fringe, underground,” says Simon White, an internationally qualified piercer and experienced tattoo artist. With Derek Baker, Jason Macdonald and “apprentice” Manuela Balona, he runs a tattoo studio called Metal Machine, in the middle of Cape Town’s Long Street. “Since Madonna had her belly- button pierced, it’s become very mainstream. Same with when the supermodels had tattoos.”
Somehow, it’s difficult to believe that Iman, Christy Turlington and company are role models for all those Capetonians willing to submit themselves to the drill of the tattoo machine. So why the increasing enthusiasm to mark the flesh — permanently?
“Because it’s so cool,” Baker states. White suggests differently. He shows me The Piercing Point: A Guide to Getting Jabbed, an article on the “modern primitive’s passage towards spiritual enlightenment”. The article offers other enlightening snippets of historical information. For example, in the 1800s “the Prince Albert was used to hold down a man’s upstanding, wandering penis to his pant leg”.
If that sounds painful, consider its older, distant relatives, infibulation and scarification. These are still practised today, but with the religious symbolism largely excised — at least in the equivalent stalking the streets of Cape Town. As Baker sees it, the current popularity of body jewellery and tattooing has less to do with South Africa’s own coming of age than with the media’s exaltation of them as “new” and desirable fashion accessories.
But if the media is responsible for divesting skin art of its dubious past, it is also accountable for establishing new myths of the trade. White says a recent feature in Cosmopolitan alleged that Aids and hepatitis B can be transferred via tattoos, when there is no registered incident of this being true. “The sterilisation laws are so high in the States and in Europe that you just don’t get it. It’s safer than going to the dentist.” (Beware amateur scratchers, though, for as yet South Africa has no legal body for ensuring strict sterilisation procedures.)
One of the most enduring myths, however, has got to be the connection between tattooing and the underbelly of the crime world. In Japan in the 1970s, Baker says, “if you had tattoos you weren’t allowed in certain bathhouses, because they considered you to be a
Cape Town’s “gangsters” have it easy by comparison — nothing as hardcore as the traditional Japanese body suit, executed by hand. “They wear the tattoos, they don’t collect them. It’s a whole suit. Here it’s lots of little ones, whatever goes.” Asked whether he’s planning on having his entire body covered, Baker answers “Oh yes, working on it slooowly …”
Transforming oneself into a fleshy canvas is a serious venture, if only because of the permanence. And judging from the number, variety and intricacy of designs currently being exhibited, tattoos are here to stay.
“It’s a kind of personal geography inscribed on my body,” a Metal Machine client explains. “I did it because it was permanent; it’s the one thing I can rely on not to change.”
No part of the body is sacred, no image sacrosanct. Whether the images are customised, lifted off album covers or plundered from the stock of tattoo stereotypes, “a good tattoo”, in Baker’s opinion, “is a nice piece of artwork”.
The onus, naturally, falls on the tattooer to produce this artwork. The job requires 100 percent concentration, nerves of steel and a steady hand — or you might end up singing Neil Young’s song about heroin in a different light: “I’ve seen the needle and the damage done.”