The Bat Tattoo

6 Roswell Clark

It was a day full of bright sunlight, the kind that makes you blink when you come out of a cinema matinée with nothing but reality ahead of you. I was standing in front of the Fulham Tattoo Centre. Jesus, I thought, is this really me about to go into a tattoo parlour? Although beautiful young models and other sleek and chic people now sport tattoos, often in places somewhat off the beaten track, I am old enough to associate tattoo parlours with drunken sailors, neon signs with missing letters, and pawnshops offering knuckle-dusters and flick knives. It isn’t like that now: nothing nocturnal, the Fulham Tattoo Centre stood in the respectable broad daylight of the Fulham Road between a continental grocer and a launderette. Writ large on the windows in red outlined with yellow were the words TATTOO, BODY PIERCING, and the telephone number. Body piercing, I reflected, has been celebrated by Christianity for centuries in paintings and sculpture and I have seen Sacred-Heart tattoos from time to time. Peoples with other gods do both and turn up in National Geographic.

WARNING, said a sign in the window:

NO

PERSON TATTOOED

UNDER THE

INFLUENCE OF

DRINK OF DRUGS.

Inside there were further admonitions:

IF YOU ARE IN

A RUSH DON’T

EXPECT ME TO BE.

A GOOD

TATTOO

TAKES TIME

TO DO.

And:

TATTOOS LAST

A LIFETIME, SO

MAKE SURE YOU

GET THE BEST.

A lifetime! What about me? Was I going to last a lifetime? The tattoo would have to take its chances with me.

The walls were decked with dragons, devils, daggers, hearts, flowers, skeletons, Chinese ideographs and abstract repeat patterns that you might see in a typographic catalogue. There was a display case containing a variety of ornaments meant to be attached to or passed through the wearer’s flesh. There were large colour photographs of a naked oriental woman whose body was completely covered with what appeared to be either one long story or a series of colourful abstractions. My attention was diverted by two young black women, one tall and pretty, the other short and plain, both with studs in their noses. They were perusing floral designs.

‘Where?’ said the pretty one.

‘Where would you do it?’ said the plain one.

‘Here.’ She put her hand just above the pubic area. ‘What about you?’

‘I’d do mine a little higher up,’ said the plain one.

A large white man with a broken nose came in. He was wearing a T-shirt, had a Union Jack on his right arm and nothing on his left. He stood for a while in front of a red devil design, then left looking thoughtful. SOOTTAT, said the red-and-yellow letters on the window as I looked out. This is all there is, said the Fulham Road.

‘Mr Clark,’ said Mick Corbett, the tattoo artist, as he emerged from that part of the studio where the work was done, ‘I’m ready for you now.’ A tall man in his thirties, serious-looking, he had a very small dark moustache and a beard that was little more than a chin-outliner; the close-cropped receding hair on top of his head was equally minimal. I’d asked him earlier how he came to take up tattooing.

‘My older brother had tattoos,’ he said, ‘and I wanted to get tattooed too but I was only twelve then and I was too young. When I was fifteen I went back and got a tattoo and after that I kept coming in for more until they were sick of the sight of me. They said, “Why don’t you save up and get the tools and learn how to do it yourself?” So I did and it took me five years before I was ready to do it for money.’

‘Where did you go to learn it?’ I asked him.

‘I just practised on myself and my friends for the first three years.’

‘On yourself!’

‘Yes. Most tattoo artists have terrible-looking legs because that’s where you practise when you’re learning. You put your leg up on a chair and it’s easy to work on.’

His arms were illustrated so copiously that the designs merged in a jungle of pattern and colour from which faces, or perhaps not, peeped indistinctly. I followed him into the STRICTLY PRIVATE area and we went into a little fluorescent-lit room that looked very medical: a white enamel instrument table, glass shelving for more instruments and a tall shelf unit for coloured inks. An Anglepoise lamp gave additional light to a towel-covered arm rest; I’d given him a photo of the bowl with my bat a couple of days ago and he’d done an enlarged copy of the bat on tracing paper. Laying the tracing on carbon paper with the carbon side up he’d gone over the outline to prepare the tracing for transfer to my skin.

He put on latex gloves, sprayed my shoulder with antiseptic liquid, then shaved it, went over it with an alcoholic stick, and applied the transfer. When he lifted the tracing paper there was the dark-blue outline of my bat, about two and a quarter inches from wingtip to wingtip. After a few minutes for drying there was more antiseptic, then Vaseline to lubricate the skin. He prepared the disposable caps for the two inks, a light red and a dark red, and dipped the outlining machine into the dark red. Then I placed my arm on the arm rest, the gleaming little machine buzzingly approached my shoulder, the needle pricked my skin, and the eighteenth-century bat of the Yongzheng period taxied down the runway into the new century on me. Would it get me off the ground? I was paying for the tattoo but was I a legitimate passenger or a stowaway?

Before this I hadn’t put my tattoo thoughts into words with any precision; I felt that in being tattooed I was offering myself to some unknown chance of luck; but now it came to me with simple clarity that I just wanted that bat to take me aboard and fly me out of where I was in myself.

When I’m in a pub with a few drinks in me I can talk more or less freely to strangers but I don’t like to lay out my whole history for everybody and it isn’t easy for me to type it out here. I’ll say what I can and maybe more at another time. At my present age of forty-seven my back story is not an album of happy memories. I was married for seven years; Jennifer died in a car crash in 1995. After that I kept mostly to myself for the next few years: I did some painting and drawing, some reading. I watched a lot of videos, went to museums and concerts, lived from day to day the best I could. I’d nothing much to say to anyone; I got fewer and fewer dinner invitations and became more and more boring to myself. But after a while I was ready to move on to whatever was next and that’s when I decided on a bat tattoo and met Sarah Varley. That encounter at the V & A was the sort of thing that sometimes leads to a closer acquaintance but I didn’t feel like starting with a new person; there was still too much unfinished business in my head.

Adelbert Delarue was much in my mind of course. He was delighted with the gorilla and particularly with the Bach tape. ‘So austere!’ he wrote. ‘This so noble primate with his grandeur priapic, how he resonates and echoes lost evolutionary memories while the music goes up and down and in and out with him. To this I respond with my whole heart and membrum virilis also. With a friend I watch this moving art of yours and we find in it always new stimulation and new things to think about deeply. Those black-and-yellow discs, the eroticism of them! Life, what is it? Motion, to where does it take us? “Ou sont les neiges d’antan?”’

His cheque had arrived with his letter. A few weeks passed with no further word. Then one day another letter arrived:

My dear Roswell,

These so powerful works that you have executed for me have been a source of great satisfaction to me and I hope to you also. My friend and I (her name is Victoria Fawles and with her I improve my English) amuse ourselves with these creatures of wood and we with grease paint apply to ourselves the black-and-yellow discs of dummyhood. A carnival of strange sensations — who can define the boundaries of pleasure? My commissions are of course selfish but it is my desire that this money be useful to you. This talent of yours, of what does it dream? With what powerful themes has it not yet engaged? Ah, to be young and strong with the whole world before one! Think, search, open your mind and heart to what awaits you.

Good luck, dear friend,

Adelbert Delarue

PS. No, no, I must not apply pressure. Art is a mystery that in its own time happens as it will.

‘Young and strong with the whole world before one’! Well of course he didn’t know my age — it hadn’t come up in our correspondence — but what made him think I was young and strong? My limewood gorilla was young and strong but he never would grow old and he had batteries to power his passions. At the moment I didn’t have any passions.

I didn’t like Delarue’s letter. Although he said that he ‘must not apply pressure’, that’s exactly what he was doing by attributing depths to my talent that simply weren’t there. ‘Powerful themes’! If I saw one coming towards me I’d cross to the other side of the road.

‘Try to hold still,’ said Mick Corbett. He paused every now and then to wipe away the blood and the excess ink. ‘All right?’ he said.

‘Fine.’

He completed the outline, then changed to a rotary machine for the shading and filling-in. I suppose the whole thing took about half an hour, and when it was finished he applied surgical spirits to clean the tattoo, patted it dry, put on a small amount of antiseptic cream, then a dressing which I was told to keep on for one hour. There followed instruction for the care of my bat and a photocopied sheet headed TATTOO AFTERCARE. My bat cost forty pounds which was unquestionably a bargain if it could fly me to a better place.

‘I hope it brings you luck,’ said Mick Corbett as I left. I’d told him the bat was a happiness symbol. I looked at my watch to note the time so I’d remember when to remove the dressing, then I crossed the road, went down to the corner, and turned left into the North End Road. I was feeling receptive and half-expecting something significant to happen. After passing Blockbusters I crossed the road to the tiny plaza next to the church. There’s a little raised garden with a couple of trees in it and a low retaining wall around it. This wall provides seating for a low-budget drinking community. Some of them look like pensioners, others are probably on the dole; I don’t know whether the population changes but the numbers always seem about the same. Today there was a one-man splinter group who sat with his back against the church railings shouting something unintelligible in harsh monosyllables.

I walked past him and stopped outside the church, the Parish Church of St John, Walham Green. I’m in that part of the North End Road often but only now did I notice that the figure of Christ on the cross was not the one that used to be there. I remembered the old one as being made of wood and I remembered liking it. This new one was a fibreglass job as smooth as a surfboard and about the same colour as the dummy in my original Crash-Test toy. In face and form it was not unacceptably prettified but the high-gloss effect was perhaps a little slick for a redeemer. Jesus, I thought, you’ve come a long way since Tilman Riemenschneider.

The cross, a black one, seemed to be the old one, with the INRI scroll and the little roof over it. Towards the bottom of it was a brass plaque:

Originally erected

to the glory of God

and in memory

of members and past members

of the

17th Fulham and Chelsea Battalion

Church Lads’ Brigade

who gave their lives in the war.

Restored 1997

in memory of

Lois Child

(1901–1996)

a faithful parishioner.

At the foot of the cross were flowers in vases and little candles, some of them overturned, surrounded by a circle of whitewashed bricks.

In my field of vision was a plane tree leaning over an illegible headstone. The tree and the headstone were dark in the foreground of the picture in my eyes; beyond them there was a sunlit vista of North End Road with people and traffic: a practical demonstration of life beyond the grave. Despite the sunshine it was beginning to rain. The light darkened, the sky became grey; a spotlight bracketed to the ground illuminated a corner of the church without shedding much light on Jesus.

I doubted that there was a Church Lads’ Brigade in World War II; this memorial must have been erected after World War I. As the rain fell I imagined, helped by my recall of grainy newsreels, the Church Lads’ Brigade with fixed bayonets going out of the trenches, over the top towards the enemy while Jesus in large and small crucifixes, in paintings and sculpture, in wood and in various metals, died for their sins. And now in fibreglass.

I went into the church where I found Father John Hunter, the curate, a tall, squarely built man in cassock and dog collar. Balding, with close-cropped grey hair and spectacles, he looked as if he was careful of souls and wary of eggs. The thirty-nine buttons on his cassock symbolised the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and they were all buttoned up but I wondered if he ever found himself listening for something he couldn’t hear.

I asked Father John about the old Jesus and he said it hadn’t been wood but terracotta, shattered when the cross came down in a storm ten or more years ago and replaced a couple of years later by this one. The cross was the original one, restored.

Inside the doorway near the always-open chapel was a bulletin board to which were pinned an advertisement for Weight Watchers, handwritten notices from people looking for jobs and flats, and one that said CUT AND BLOW DRY. RING TONY.