Why I’ll never regret my gap year tattoo
I blame my school friend Sarah. We were 18-year-olds on our gap year, taking a ferry to the island of Koh Phi Phi in Thailand when she got talking to a woman on the wooden bench beside us. I say woman, she was more tattoo than woman. Every inch of her fleshy arms and legs was branded with dark ink. “You can’t go to Phi Phi and not get a bamboo tattoo,” she told Sarah, explaining that the island was famous for such tattoos, a technique originally used by Thai monks who branded warriors with Buddhist prayers to protect them.
Sarah was very taken with this idea. Throughout our travels across Cambodia, up through Vietnam, down through Laos and on to the Thai islands, she’d been carrying her own sketch of a tattoo that she wanted on her back, just above her bottom. It looked like a gnarled olive tree to me, with five points which Sarah claimed represented five different elements including love and friendship.
Cut to the tattoo parlour a few evenings later. Sarah lay on her stomach while a wizened Thai man, using a long stick of bamboo with needles lashed to its end, tapped at her back. I’d drunk just enough Thai rum (a lot) to think it was also a good idea and decided on the same tattoo for the arch of my right foot. Sarah took a photo of me lying on the bed, the red bucket of Coca-Cola and Sangsom balanced on my stomach, a straw in my mouth, as the Thai man jabbed at my skin with his bamboo cane, a glowing spliff hanging from his mouth. If it hurt, I didn’t notice.
My friend Cara, also travelling with us, decided to get the same on her right foot. It cost us three dollars in total, one apiece, and afterwards we went out dancing because bamboo cane tattoos are less deep than normal tattoos so don’t need to be covered with plasters and protected in the same way. And also because we were very drunk.
It’s still on my foot now, hardly faded. I can see it in various friends’ wedding photos, poking over the top of my shoes. My grandmother, of the generation who thought only sailors got tattoos, was appalled, but I’ve always loved and never regretted it.
A gap year tattoo is an enormous cliché, and a posh girl having a brief flirtation with a needle even more so. Samantha Cameron has a dolphin on her heel; Sienna Miller a dove on her wrist; Poppy Delevingne has a heart on the nape of her neck, inked by her more tattooed sister, Cara. But, nearly 20 years on, mine still makes me smile whenever I see it in the bath, a reminder of those wonderfully liberating six months travelling with two of my favourite people.
Cara hates hers and says she’ll get it removed one day. If she does, she’ll be grateful that the removal technique has improved in recent years thanks to a new form of laser which uses a shorter wavelengths to break down the ink more effectively. An Old Etonian friend recently had one removed from his arm. As has Victoria Beckham. Her husband’s initials, along with the date she and David renewed their wedding vows, recently vanished from her wrist. Did this mean the Beckhams’ marriage was toast? No, explained Victoria, the tattoos were old, the ink had started to bleed and she simply fancied having daintier, unmarked wrists.
“Imagine a tattoo is like a boulder,” explains my pal. “The old laser broke the ink into pebbles under the skin, whereas the new one breaks it down into sand so it disappears faster. But it f------ hurts.”
Tattoo removal is presumably going to become big business, given that a quarter of Brits are now said to have a tat, or some form of “body art”, whereas it was less than a fifth of us in the 1980s. And not everyone got theirs done on a Thai island; the number of tattoo parlours in the UK, according to a Which? survey, jumped 44 per cent between 2014 and 2019.
I’d advise anyone hankering after their own body art to think about it slightly more than I did, but if you want a small symbol on your wrist to remember someone, or “MUM” on your bicep, or even a smiley face on that pad of your index finger as a friend has, why not? Frith Street Tattoo in Soho is the place to go, according to another friend who’s often adding to the sleeve that runs down his arm. As for my tattoo, it turns out Sarah’s sketch wasn’t a gnarled olive tree at all, but a design she’d copied from our history teacher’s WH Smith folder at school in our A-level classes. So now my right foot is branded with a WH Smith design. But I still love it for the memories.
