SKIN DEEP

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 January 1938, Page 13

SKIN DEEP

ART OF THE TATTOOIST.

Professor Burchett talked of tattooin"' in a B B.C. address recently, says the "Listener.” “My best customers,” iie said, “are not sailors and dock labourers. —as they were in my old days nearly lialf-a-century ago—but women. Only yesterday I had as a client a middle-aged lady who wanted to have brought to her pale cheeks a permanent ruddy complexion —one that wouldn’t wash off —and I made her lips bloom once again. That lady can

throw her cosmetic box away at once, thanks to the tattooist’s needle. Ido a great deal of tinting to make women s complexions as school-girlish. as possible. And to these ladies too, I can say: “You want the best eyebrows. I have them.’ "A short, time ago a wealthy woman camo to my place and said she wanted me to make her look os much like Cleopatra as possible. She wished to be tattooed on the legs, arms, and back with long green snakes, and her orders were obeyed. Yet another woman instructed mo to make a, picture on her arm of her favourite poodle with its name inscribed underneath. Then there are feminine clients who want the favourite hymn of their late husbands, or a. picture, of the churcr at which they were married, inscribed. Some women make requests which no tattooist could comply with. Most of _i T 4-nll-nn. rpfar tn IOV6. till Ct

the designs I tattoo reier io 10ve, u next in order comes war, and then ie-lip-ion. Recently you heard ot a man who had his will tattooed on his back. 1 was the man who did it. What keeps me most busy is inscribing figures of a. heart with the name of a| girl underneath, but, alas!, aJaLe number of my clients who naxe this done come to me soon afterwards to have the name of the lady changed. O n e such customer has now. made the change thirty-one times. A woman who has been jilted paid me a. i eturn visit to have one of these love inscriptions in the form of a heart changed from red to black. A job of tattooing may take anything from two minutes, which is the usual speed, to a hundred hours, this being the biggest job I ever had. It meant painting a mermaid sceno almost entirely across a client’s body. During Coronation time, I was ■ kept busy almost night and day using my electric needles to engrave crowns,

Union Jacks, and the letters G.R., chiefly on the arms of visitors from abroad, many of whom had been my clients during the war twenty-odd years ago. The strangest job Ive ever had to do was to tattoo a man s head and most of his body like a zebra. It was for show purposes, and ho was very pleased with himself when he looked at the glass. Once the relative of a murdered man asked me to tattoo the word ‘Revenge’ and a bullet mark on his skin.’’