No Ragrets
You take a bunch of shirts to the tailor. Not something you usually do. You adjust your expectations to fit the shirt, not the other way around. But you were recently given some shirts that are very nice, nicer than anything you’d ever buy for yourself. The arms are the right size, but the shoulders are too broad, making you look like a little boy dressing up as an office worker.
You walk into the tailor. The shopfront is empty. Behind the counter there is a photograph of a dignified gentleman in an elegant suit surrounded by four beautiful women with dark chestnut hair. They’re all smiling broadly. They might be at a wedding. The man from the photograph emerges from the back room looking out of sorts. His shirt is untucked beneath his woolen vest.
You ask him how his morning has been. He groans and asks you what you want. You lay your shirts out proudly on the bench and he looks at them, taking the fabric between his thumb and forefinger. Not bad, he says. He instructs you to put on one of the shirts and stand in front of the mirror.
As you button the shirt up the man points at an A4 print-out of a young man with ruddy cheeks, his hair parted neatly down the middle. That’s my son there, the man says. He looks like you, you say. He died, the man says. In a few weeks we have the funeral. Life is very hard sometimes.
You leave the tailor and see a sticker adhered to a lamppost. The sticker depicts a cartoon hand, or maybe it’s a glove, with the thumb and forefinger touching in a gesture commonly signifying “Ok,” though you have read online that this sign is also used by white supremacists these days. The hand in the sticker is anthropomorphic. On the palm there is a cheerful little face. There are two skinny legs descending from the wrist, mid-stride.
The sticker’s design reminds you of something, but lately everything is reminding you of something else. Beneath the sticker there is a small line of text. You approach to read. “Swift Tattoo Removal,” it says.
*
You’re sitting outside a grocery store when you see a man with a large calf tattoo depicting the Carlton Football Club mascot and underneath it a banner saying: “Premiers 2023.”
Carlton were not “Premiers 2023.” You covertly take a photo of the man’s calf.
You ask around. Turns out lots of people are getting tattoos removed. Wattles removed from ribs and cherry blossoms removed from upper thighs. A lover’s name, in cursive, taken off the shoulder. “Munted Bart Simpson” wiped from a forearm.
They tell you that they weren’t ready for a tattoo. They tell you that they were young and believed that they’d never get old enough to regret it. They tell you that they did it under pressure. They were stoned and their friend needed some skin on which to practise. They say that they were into Tumblr aesthetics at the time, hence the whimsical deer with antlers, but now no one uses Tumblr, and the tattoo is twee and embarrassing. The mandala might be appropriation. The rising sun is cringe.
They say that if you were in your twenties ten years ago in this city, you got a tattoo. That’s just what you did. It was a way to be different in exactly the same way as everyone else. But now they're supposedly less caught up with what’s cool. Or their bodies are beginning to sag in places. They’re pregnant now and they don’t want their unborn child to see “sxc btch” while breastfeeding. They’re wiser than they used to be. Or more conservative.
They tell you that the technology has improved. It’s not so painful. It’s not too expensive. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Did you see how Alice Pieszecki’s tattoo disappeared in The L Word: Gen Q? Did you know that Pete Davidson had all of his inky paeans to Kim Kardashian removed from his pin-cushion body?
Everyone’s doing it, but you didn’t notice. Tattoo removal is an invisible trend.
*
You call the tailor and ask if the shirts are ready. It’s been six weeks. Do shirts usually take this long to alter? You need them by Friday. The tailor says that he hasn’t even started working on the shirts. He has been busy. What can you say? The man’s son just died. You ask if it would be better if you came and picked up the shirts and took them to another tailor. Yes, the man says. That’s a good idea.
On Friday afternoon you’re walking north up Swanston St to collect the shirts. It is warm and winter skin is exposed for the first time in months. You see a young woman with a yellow tweety bird on her shoulder. A bearded man with the planetary system lined up in order along his forearm.
Further up, at the corner of Little Collins, there are two men cleaning graffiti off a marble sculpture, just by where the new Brunetti is going up. Another man wearing a bright red bandana and black nail polish takes a sharpie from his pocket and scribbles “Qbee for Mayor” on the sculpture, on the exact spot the workers have just scrubbed clean.
He shouts: If you didn’t remove it I wouldn’t have to put it back up every fucken day.
The workers shrug and walk away. One of them has a spikey, tribal pattern creeping up towards his neck from under his collar. Something about how the tattoo is partially concealed reminds you of your school bus driver, Ray. He had a tattoo of a tattooed lady running the length of his arm, naked except for a pair of stilettos. We’d gawk at the tattoo of the tattooed lady while boarding the bus in the morning. Ray would grunt and turn his arm inward.
*
You arrive at a threshold down a lane. On the door you see the sticker of the cheerful “Ok” hand with the little legs. You head up a narrow flight of stairs and see a glass cabinet on which is written: Coffee (black); Whiskey (neat); Hair (cut); Shoes (bespoke).
You recall that you’ve been here before, probably over a decade ago. You came for lunch because you had one friend who insisted on going to these new cafes that kept opening. This particular one was the apotheosis of these new cafes, because it wasn’t just a cafe, but also a whiskey distillery, a gentleman’s barbershop, and a bespoke cobbler.
You remember how you sat at a corner table feeling sheepish and cynical. You looked at the various tchotchkes for sale on the shelves. Brylcreem. A straight razor. Tour de France cap. A wooden abacus. Your friend picked up the abacus. It cost $120 and was advertised as an “early Abacus.” The waiter, with a waxed moustache and heart and dagger tattoos, came over. Your friend asked how early the early abacus was, considering that the abacus has been around for thousands of years. The waiter said, I don’t know. You can’t remember what you ordered but it would’ve been vegetarian. We were all vegetarian then. And everyone was getting tattoos. You didn’t have a tattoo yet, but you would soon. The first one was of a lemon but your friends said it looked more like a potato.
*
Almost nothing has changed since that last visit except in the far corner there is a new tenant: Swift Tattoo Removal. You think: One minute you’re vegetarian and getting a tattoo of a lemon, the next you’re eating steak au poivre and considering laser removal.
The room looks like a tattoo parlour, with a massage table and antiseptic accoutrements. But instead of tattoo guns, in the corner of the room are two hulking machines reminiscent of ATMs but with a mechanical arm jutting out from the top. Sitting on a stool next to the machines is a woman with peroxide blonde hair and a jewel in her tooth. She is the removalist.
The removalist has been lasering off ink from people’s skin for a decade. She tells you that she kind of stumbled into the job by accident while working the front desk at a tattoo shop on Chapel Street, inside of which there was a tattoo removal service.
This is surprising. Why would there be a tattoo removalist inside a tattoo shop? Isn’t there some antagonism between these two services? Doesn’t the allure of a tattoo derive from the fact of its permanence?
No, the removalist says. She loves tattoos. That’s why she removes them. She says that people often think that tattoo removal is an occupation that deals only in regret. Disappearing the names of exes. Correcting impulsive decisions. Erasing the evidence of a cultural signifier now considered offensive. There is some of that, she says. The clients who see removal as erasure often arrive at the studio with a story. The tattoo has a meaning and they want to get rid of it. The removalist listens to the stories with no judgement. Some days I feel like a therapist, she says.
But a lot of her work, maybe even most of her work, comes from those who do not regret their tattoos, but just want to clear space on the limited real estate of their bodies to make space for new ones. They come to her because they want to redecorate. The removalist has had seven tattoos removed in total and is currently having another one taken off, an umbrella that sits above her left elbow. Why? She doesn’t really like the way it looks anymore. That’s it. No deeper meaning.
You ask if it hurts.
Yes.
More than getting a tattoo?
It feels like an elastic band slapping the skin really hard over and over. And it’s a bigger commitment. Removing a large tattoo can take many years. Sessions are spaced out every couple of months because the treatments are intense. The lasers shoot heat into the pigment to the point where it shatters into little particles small enough for your white blood cells to process. The ink enters your lymphatic system and then your liver. Eventually, you piss it out.
*
Back on Swanston St the clouds are doing that thing where they look like droplets dangling precariously low above the city—globules of cloud. A man is playing accordion outside the State Library. You head up the stairs and inside, to the Heritage Reading Room. A man lets you in and asks you what you’re looking for. You say, How to do Good Tattooing by Miss Cindy Ray. He goes into a back room and comes out holding a plastic sleeve, inside of which is the book in question. On the cover there is a young woman in a silk blouse arranged to reveal her extensively tattooed chest. She is holding her hands cupped in front of her—a supplicant gesture, Madonna-like. Her makeup and blonde bouffant are unmistakably 1960s.
It’s an arresting and beautiful image, at once contemporary, mid-century, and Medieval. It depicts Miss Cindy Ray, the supposed author of this book—a tattooist’s instruction manual published in 1965. More likely it was written by Harry Bartram, a photographer and conman who convinced Cindy Ray to get all of her tattoos when she was nineteen.
It was the early 1960s. Bartram put an ad in the paper offering money to any woman willing to be photographed with her eyebrows shaved. Cindy Ray, who was then a teenaged single mum called Bev, answered. Bartram told her he didn’t actually want her to shave her eyebrows. He wanted her to get tattoos. He knew a guy called Danny Robinson who could cover her in the most beautiful tattoos she’d ever seen. And then they could sell photos of her body.
Bev had only ever seen one woman with a tattoo. She worked at a Chinese restaurant on the waterfront and had a cabbage rose on her shoulder. It was quite elegant. But she was worried about what her parents and friends would think. She also needed money. Within six months, Bev was covered in butterflies, topless women, sailing ships, snakes, jaguars, palm trees, swords, dragons, and ornate flowers framing her nipples.
Bartram told her that her name was no longer Bev. Now, she would be known as Cindy Ray. He photographed her sprawled over leopard skin throws, sometimes wearing a wig, sometimes wearing flamboyant horn-rimmed glasses, sometimes wearing nothing at all. He sold the photos to tattoo fans and fetishists in America who were willing to spend a lot for photos of a naked white woman with tattoos. She became an icon. Bartram owned the copyright to Cindy Ray’s image. He signed her autograph on her behalf. He wrote books in her name. (Like this one, which doesn’t really read like a book, but more like an advertisement for Bartram’s patented Cindy Ray Tattooing Machine, Cindy Ray Power Box, and Cindy Ray Coloured Ink.)
Bartram was cashing in. Cindy Ray saw little of the money. He took her on tour to circuses and rural shows across Australia and New Zealand, marketing her as “the classy lassie with the tattooed chassis,” or “Miss Technicolour.” (Her tattoos were in black, bright red, bright bluish green, and yellow.) He said that she “put the oo in tattoo.” People paid to come and gawk at her. Some tried to scrub off her ink, convinced it was fake. When people insulted her she’d say, “My excuse for being an idiot is I’m paid for it. What’s yours?” She often felt like an animal in the zoo. The worst was when she’d be standing there, on show, and she’d recognise a relative or a girl she went to school with, or a teacher. “Well, those were the times when I feel very small,” she said, “and wish I had found some other way to earn bread.”
One day, Bartram disappeared, leaving Bev with nothing but the tattoos. She married Danny Robinson, the man who tattooed her. He had a tattoo shop near the waterfront in Williamstown. She raised her child. She went by Bev again, not Cindy Ray. She covered up her body in public. Then Danny broke his hand. They were short on money. She picked up the gun and learned how to tattoo in Danny’s place. By accident and by necessity, she became one of the first women tattoo artists in Australia. To begin she tattooed sailors, bikies, and cons. They got tattoos of anchors, gang insignia, hearts with the name of their mother. The tattoos marked them as men destined for violence. By inflicting the wound themselves, they sought to condemn their bodies to a fate they felt they couldn’t escape.
She didn’t judge her clients. They didn’t judge her. She got a reputation for being a talented artist. She was sought out far and wide. She was invited to travel to meet other pioneers like Sailor Jerry and Ed Hardy. She was surprised and dismayed at her own notoriety. She still didn’t particularly like her own tattoos. She considered removal. Her husband removed tattoos at a women’s prison using tannic acid and peroxide. It left scars. Some doctors did skin grafts, but she didn’t have enough non-tattooed flesh from the inner thigh to cover the expansive tattoos on her torso. In her 30s, she tried to get some removed from her lower leg with early laser technology. Her ankle blistered and began to swell. She went to the doctor who told her to stop the treatment. If she didn’t, they might have to amputate.
She resigned herself to the markings on her body, insignia of youthful foolishness, but then as the decades passed, slowly, slowly, her clients began to change. Footy players. Some women. Even a few lawyers. She was in Safeway one day, in the meat section, and she saw a pretty, respectable-seeming young woman with a tattoo covering her lower back, wearing it with pride. She thought: well I guess I don’t have to cover mine anymore, and showed her shoulders while grocery shopping for the first time since she was nineteen.
Now, tattoos are so omnipresent that hers no longer turn heads. It’s a relief, but she still says that getting them was a mistake. If she had her time again she wouldn’t have any. She imagines living a quiet life, with no one hassling her, calling her landline on a Tuesday night, asking her intimate questions about her life and regrets.
Towards the end of How to do Good Tattooing, there is a page of advice for aspiring tattooists. Don’t tattoo drunks. Keep off the face. No obscene symbols. And finally, keep off teenage girls. “If you tattoo the youthful you are looking for trouble, and O’ Brother You Sure Will Find it.”
You look at Cindy Ray’s photograph on the next page, in which she is having her back tattooed by her future husband, Danny. He is young and handsome. She is grinning. “Before I interested myself in tattooing I was just a very ordinary working girl,” Cindy writes. “I seemed to live in a very small pool, and tattooing for me, has broken open that pool, it has opened my way to the whole world.” Oscar Wilde said it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
*
You leave the library. You walk into an expensive clothing shop and then out again. You help yourself to some hand cream from a free dispenser. You walk past a laser clinic advertising Cool Sculpting Technology—a laser so powerful that it can, apparently, change the shape of your rounded stomach or your receded jaw. The before and after photographs are impressive. The clinic is full.
On the corner of La Trobe and Swanston, tea-coloured water flows out from the Metro Tunnel site and rushes down the hill towards Elizabeth, where they say there used to be a river.
You turn right and then left and stop outside a pub. You wonder if you should go inside. It’s Friday afternoon. They say that tomorrow the sky opens up and you have a direct line with the Almighty. You’ll be embarking on a 25 hour fast after sunset to mark the occasion, to atone for sins accumulated over the previous year, to be inscribed in the book of life.
You order a pot of Japanese lager. You see a poster on the wall for an upcoming gig, the rerelease of an album recorded in 2008. It’s called Adult Baby. You take out your phone and look up the album on Spotify. You finish your beer, put in your headphones, and head north listening to Adult Baby.
The songs feel familiar though you’re almost certain you’ve never heard them before. Some are sweet and bouncy, others exquisitely melancholy. “I look at them with their eyes so clear,” the artist sings. “Their skin so smooth and shiny hair and I want to cry or at least have sex with them so that I won’t feel so old.”
*
At last you arrive at the tailor. The shopfront is empty. You call out. The old man bounds out of the back room. He is dressed sharply, shirtsleeves rolled up, a length of measuring tape hanging from his shoulders. You tell him you’re here to pick up the shirts.
What shirts? These ones? Oh, they’re beautiful shirts. Beautiful. It would be a shame to let someone else fix them. No, please. I’m better now. It’s ok. I have time. Let me do them. I can do them.
You say ok and the man looks pleased. He tells you to stand in front of the mirror again, and to take your shirt off. He wants to measure again, to make sure.
You take off your top. You see the tailor consider the marks on your body and recoil a little. Fair enough. Your torso is a patchwork of millenial folly. The stick-and-poke elephant on your hip that looks more like a ram. The band of colourful flowers around your forearm. The thorny spikes across your shoulder. The tattoos are ageing, along with your body. They are beginning to fade, naturally, to become transparent. They were supposed to be signifiers of your singular character, but they actually signify your conformity to a certain time and a certain place. Back then, the idea of conformity repelled you. You were an individual. But not anymore. The idea of belonging, by skin, to a collective youth, a time and place that is now disappearing, strikes you as kind of nice. You could remove them, but you’d probably regret it.