Tattoos and our attitudes are not just skin-deep

Melanie McDonagh

OW you regard tattoos says a good deal about you: whether you see your epidermis as a veritable c a nvas f or the out ward expression of your inner self — a kind of sacramental thing, really — or whether you like it just as it is — white, in my case, with a few unsightly cooking scars on the arm.

The Police Federation has taken sides on the issue, having called for a change in the rules on police dress, which bans body art that cannot be concealed by everyday clothing. It is researching the attitudes of the police and public towards officers with tattoos.

So, let’s put our oars in now, shall we? My own view is that if I come across a n officer covered with rich and varied body art, one of the crucial distinctions between him or her and the criminal c l a s s e s v a ni she s . Tat t o o s may b e ubiquitous but they are also a useful indicator of character, and if you come across someone with a Greek motto on their neck or a dragon motif in three colours up the arm, why, you don’t need to probe any further into the inner depths: under the ink, a twerp.

In this case, character is indeed skin deep: how you see yourself is right out there. But the awful thing, which professional tatooists really should be obliged to point out alongside the cost of professional removal of their handiwork, is that our sense of our identity is nowadays a fleeting and evanescent thing. We’re a bit like the plecoptera, only more so: that odd little creature that mutates twice until its final incarnation as a rather boring stonefly.

And in our case we regard identity as infinitely mutable — I mean, the whole transgender thing is proof of our quest for the elusive inner self, unbounded by gender or chromosomes, let alone anything so humdrum as background and family. Fancy having your inner self tattooed at enormous expense at the age of 18 only to find that by the time you get a job that the rose creeping from ankle to thigh isn’t what they want at Cazenove?

The old lags’ habit of immortalising their present girlfriend’s name on their body symbolises the vanity of these things: they change, you know. At least David Beckham took the precaution of tatooing his children’s names on himself. That’s fairly safe.

A third of the population is said to have a tattoo of one sort, which, when you think this figure includes the elderly, means that about half of young people h ave t h e m. I t mu s t b e stopped. Especially in the case of quite nicely brought-up girls such as Cara Delevingne, whose tattoos seem like a tragic bid to say that she’s hard, hard, hard — notwithstanding being privately educated and a successful model and actress.

I should at this point say that my own grandfather had a tattoo: a blue anchor on his lower arm, but he was a seaman and for sailors that was practically obligatory, part of the uniform.

The obvious solution is to make every tattoo semi-permanent or, like my d a u g h t e r ’s Superman, ac tually washable. You can indeed turn your body into a canvas, except when the mood changes so does the body art.

A friend of mine saw a police officer in Notting Hill with tattoos covering both arms yesterday — plainly the Met is ahead of the herd here. It didn’t make him more approachable — au contraire. But perhaps, as the Police Federation points out, a very talented individual may lurk beneath.

Look, we’re essentially superficial, most of us; our regard for the police is contingent on them looking the part. And if a police officer is covered with roses, sonnets or Pokémon, I for one will lose that deference on which the Met really depends.