Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

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.