by Luc Ciotkowski
It’s almost five months now since I got my leg tattooed with a lion rampant at Madrid’s Dark Tattoo studio. After some minimal retouching (due to me bumping my leg against chairs while it was healing), the tattoo looks fantastic (in my humble opinion).
The original article appeared in the December edition of European Vibe Magazine and, at the time, many people were shocked that I had tattooed myself in the name of journalism.
In case you missed the article or were interested by it, I’ve attached my ‘writer’s cut’ longer version, chronicling my very first ‘trip to the needle’:
The Edinburgh Royal Tattoo Piercing
The last time I walked into a tattoo parlour was the summer of 2003. I woke up one morning and decided I would like to get my foreskin pierced. I made the trip to an establishment called ‘Dragon’s Lair’, a place with a name, look and feel that screamed everything I believed typical of a tattoo parlour. As I walked in the weakened-by-fighting-clouds Scottish sunshine, I clearly remember feeling more apprehensive about going into that place than at the prospect of a five-inch needle going through my genitalia. The cameo appearance of a day with temperatures above 20°C had the natives of Edinburgh taking their chance to flash their flesh and, with an array of tattoos and pierced navels on display, I was wondering if other people were more worried by the tattoo parlour than by the tattoo or piercing itself.
So, hang on a minute, why was I going to a place that gave me the creeps to make a hole in my mole? Well, I’d been there five years before to get my nipple pierced. The idea had occurred to me while drinking in a bar with some friends and, when someone had bet me I wouldn’t dare, my mind was made up. Despite my bravado, I was very relieved when a friend decided to accompany me the following day. The tattoo parlour was a bit scary, as were some of the punters, but the tattooist turned out to be nice and the needle was a clean, new one. Also, the pain was no more than an injection as my fortunately not-very-sensitive nipple was skewered.
Jumping forward again to 2003, I marched back into the same tattoo parlour and declared to the tattooist what I wanted to have pierced. It was a different guy this time and he looked surprised when I enquired about the ‘Prince Albert’ piercing. He said he didn’t do piercing and so I asked about the man who had done my nipple. He told me that the other guy had died two weeks previously of a heart attack. I took it as a sign that I wasn’t meant to get my foreskin pierced that day. Maybe one day I would get a tattoo instead… When the editor of EV gave me the assignment of an article about the tattooing culture in Madrid and Spain, it seemed obvious to me that I should get a tattoo. There’s no risk involved. At least, the only the real risk I see is if got a tattoo which I didn’t like. You see, tattoos are cool. It’s cool to have a tattoo. When I was a little boy, if I thought about tattoos, I thought about Popeye the sailor man. Today little kids think about tattoos and they think about David Beckham, Angelina Jolie and many other celebrities they consider fashionable. A fun temporary tattoo kit for children has been in the top five sales list for the last five years. Sure, we had transfers in packets of bubble gum when I was a kid and quite a lot of working class people in the UK had tattoos. But now it’s a much bigger feature of pop culture and it doesn’t matter what class, sex or social tribe you belong to; tattoos are appearing in all of them. If the leader of the British Conservative Party’s wife can have a tattoo (and she does), then we can safely say that general attitudes to tattooing are far more accepting and positive than in the past. If I hadn’t decided to get a tattoo, I would have spent a lot more of this article explaining the history and significance of tattoos. I would have talked about the fact that tattooing goes as far back as 12,000 years ago in Japan and looked more closely at Europe’s oldest natural mummy, Ötzi the Iceman, and his 57 rites-of-passage tattoos (or maybe they represented Heinz varieties?), who died around 3300 B.C. The truth is that tattoos have had a very up and down history and they have been used for almost every purpose imaginable. From marking slaves and criminals to symbolizing spiritual devotion, tattooing for decoration or just to look scary, what were considered essentially pagan traditions were all but driven out by Christianization. It was sailors who brought tattoos back to the Western world, especially from Polynesia. What about Spain then? I found out that the last king, Alfonso XIII had a tattoo, as did his son Don Juan, Count of Barcelona (King Juan Carlos’ father). However, you probably won’t find many Spaniards over 50 with a tattoo; they only really came into Spain after the end of the dictatorship, but, like with so many other things, the Spanish have been determined to catch up.
Thursday – Talking Tattoos
As I walk the 20 metres or so from Opera metro to Dark Tattoo’s premises in a 300-year-old classic Madrid de los Austrias building on Calle Escalinata, I’m feeling reassured that it’s not going to be a ‘lair’ of any sort after the EV staff’s description of it as, “A nice, clean place”.Eduardo, Dark Tattoo’s owner, gives me a friendly greeting and escorts me into the tattoo studio. I say ‘studio’ because that’s what it is, I can’t bring myself to use the word ‘parlour’; this is nothing like any tattoo parlour I’ve seen before, I think as I sit down and have a look around (a customer is having a consultation with Eduardo about extending a tattoo from his upper arm onto his lower arm). It’s sort of sparkly clean, but not in an operating theatre way, the decoration is minimalist and I keep thinking of a mix between a designer jewellery shop and a fashionable new Malasaña bar. Maybe cool without being cold would be a good way to describe it.
From the red couch I’m sitting on I can see five doors in the studio with big stylized writing: ‘piercing’; ‘tattoo’; ‘esterilización’ and the men’s and women’s bathrooms. Eduardo finishes with his customer and sits down for a chat. He tells me the customer came in wanting to add flames on his forearm and that he explained to the guy how it would match the more intricate design on his upper arm badly. He says spending time advising, making suggestions and working through designs is a key part of customer service and, for him, that’s what makes all the difference. “I want to give the customers the kind of attention I like to receive. This isn’t a tattoo studio like a cheap supermarket, where you walk in, look at the book and say, ‘I’ll have a 372…B’. We spend time with customers preparing the design and making sure it’s just right.” Eduardo takes customer care very seriously, before, during and after the tattoo, “We ask everyone to come back a week after having the tattoo done so we can explain all they need to know about the aftercare. When customers have paid their money and the tattooists have spent hours of work, I don’t want someone’s tattoo to turn out less than the best it can because of not being looked after properly. All of this takes time of course, and that’s what some studios economize on.”
I get the guided tour and the tattoo and piercing rooms are extremely clean, but a couple of little touches like the restored original beams on the ceiling and the coat pegs in the shape of darts stop them feeling like an operating theatre. On the other hand, the sterilization room looks exactly like something out of a hospital. There’s a peddle-operated wash basin, a machine for hermetically sealing body jewellery and needles, containers filled with sterilizing fluid and a biohazard bin for everything that has come into direct contact with the skin. In the corner, there is what looks like a futuristic microwave. Eduardo is very proud of the machine and he informs me this machine is what leaves everything 100% clean by steam-heating everything to 134°C. Good stuff, this sounds more stringent than a dentist’s. The moment that definitively separates Dark Tattoo from what I associate with a tattoo parlour comes when we go to sit back down. Eduardo goes to put some music on and offers me the choice, “Do you prefer Frank Sinatra or Buddha Bar?” I’m thinking that the greasy biker guy I met in Dragon’s Lair nine years ago, moshing to some very loud heavy metal while he waited, would hate this place. So, as the chilled out sounds of Buddha Bar fade in, I ask what kind of people come to the studio.
Eduardo says the majority of customers are between 25 and 40, but there can be anyone, really. “A few weeks ago, a 70-year-old woman came in to get a butterfly tattoo on her back. She said, ‘I’ve still got a lovely back, you know’.” Two thirds of his customers are women: “Girls are far more adventurous than guys in the designs and parts of the body they get tattooed and they make up between 65 and 70% of my overall customers.”What about nationalities, then? It must help that Eduardo speaks fluent English after working as an executive in multinationals in London for years: “Of course, but it’s really our central location that means we get quite a lot of foreigners”. It seems that a lot of young Americans in Madrid are getting their first tattoo and piercing experiences here, too, and I asked him about this.“Americans come over here, see people with piercings and think, ‘I want one’. They often get a piercing as soon as they arrive, knowing they can always take it out before they go back. Some come from places where getting tattoos or piercings is considered really bad and the atmosphere here is much more open to it.”I show Eduardo the design for my tattoo and he’s surprised by my decision to cut off the head off the lion (which does sound odd when you say it like that), but I’ve got a modification plan and we make an appointment for tomorrow.
Friday – Getting Tattooed
I meet the tattoo artist, Gonzo, who is going to be my best friend today. I will let him say anything he wants to me except, “Whoops”, “Oh shit” or “I’ve gone wrong”.He makes alterations to my tattoo design on Photoshop, then on paper and finally I end up with a traced transfer of the outline on my right calf. Now is my last chance to run away… No, it looks great and it’s what I want, just please don’t let it be too painful. Here we go.The needle makes first contact and, yes, that’s sore. But it’s not that bad. Feels a bit like a friction burn. I decide I’m going to shut up until he finishes the outline. I hope he doesn’t go wrong. The pain gets better and soon the outline is finished. The filling in is going to take some time, but I’m relaxed now and we’re chatting away. “People make it difficult to be a tattooist. They don’t consider it a proper job. Friends and family tend to think of it as a hobby. My dad would much prefer me to work in a stable office job from nine to six and not be finishing work on a Saturday at midnight.”
I’m feeling quite good now. Apparently, endorphins are rushing around my head and numbing the pain, maybe that’s why some people claim they enjoy the pain of getting a tattoo and keep going back for more.“I remember the dates of every single tattoo I‘ve got and I’ve got a lot of them”, says Gonzo. “Exactly how many I’ve got is a difficult question to answer. I’m working on my pyjamas.” He goes on to explain the Japanese tradition of progressively tattooing the entire body from neck to ankle, also known as ‘pyjamas’. Although I don’t want to throw a word like ‘infectious’ around with a guy who is poking me with a needle, that’s exactly what his passion and enthusiasm are.
As we wind up after a very quick, though not strictly painless two hours, Gonzo explains his opinion about tattoos: “A tattoo isn’t a drawing, that’s just what other people can see. For the person who gets it done, it’s a moment of your life; an association with experiences, memories and emotions”. Well, I’ve got my tattoo now. Gonzo wraps it up in cling film, talks me through aftercare and shows me how they clean up. He tells me what inspired him to get his first tattoo was seeing a dragon on someone’s back at the beach when he was fourteen. I don’t know if my headless lion rampant will inspire anybody, but I’m certainly very happy with it.
You can find DARK TATTOO piercing and tattoo studio at Calle Escalinata, 15, slap-bang in the centre of Madrid, a matter of metres from Ópera metro.
