THE world's most tattooed person is Tom Leppard, from the Isle
of Skye, who has 99.9 per cent of his body covered in a
leopard-skin design. The only untattooed parts of his body are the
skin between his toes and the insides of his ears. Tattoos are a
contemporary craze - with a long history of Christian disgust.
Everyone has a tattoo these days. International cricket players
display whole arms covered in them; David Beckham has a good
number; and recently Cheryl Cole spent £4000 on a rose tattoo that
spans half the length of her petite frame. One fan said: "Why
people want to mutilate their bodies with tattoos is beyond
me."
Dr Edel McAndrew, a clinical psychologist, echoes this:
"Self-expression is healthy, but there are always some who take
things too far. In fact, some psychiatrists even refer to tattooing
as a form of mutilation."
Some also regard it as a bit working class, although some of it
is surprisingly posh. Caesar, in the first century AD, reported
that all Britons stained their body with woad. King Harold's corpse
was identified after the Battle of Hastings by his tattoos; and, in
1862, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, had a Jerusalem
cross tattooed on his arm on a visit to the Holy Land.
With such royal approval, the practice became fashionable with
aristocrats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - including
women. Winston Churchill's mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, had a
snake tattooed on her wrist. It was an expensive process, but
later, as costs came down, tattoos became a hobby for society's
lower classes, and the practice fell out of favour with the
posh.
Christians have never been keen. In 325, the Emperor Constantine
banned facial tattoos among believers, as they disfigured God's
image; and in 787, a council of churches in Northumberland banned
all body markings as pagan, advocating instead the veneration of
holy images.
A thousand years on, missionaries in Polynesia condemned the
practice, which was deeply ingrained in Maori culture, quoting
Leviticus 19.28: "Do not cut your bodies for the dead, or put
tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord." In a practice known as
"holy stoning", they would try to remove tattoos by rubbing the
skin with sandstone. This involved scouring the body raw. Today,
laser surgery offers a less painful option for the removal of
unwanted markings.
The deep stain of tattoos is a cry for permanence in an
impermanent world; or the search for external identity where an
internal sense of this is shaky. This leaves the pressing question
for all tattoo virgins: if you had to have a tattoo, what would be
your mark of choice?
