In Antwerp, Not a bit of it. The Education Centre for Tattoo Art is, owner Ingrid De Quint claims, Europe’s first dedicated tattoo school. It’s about as central as you can get, on the majestic Frankrijklei right on the corner of Meir, the main shopping street. Not a Harley to be seen. Step inside, and the place is spotless – this is the sort of clean you find at the dentist.
I’ve come here to have the art of tattooing demonstrated on my own all too solid flesh, and the smell of antiseptic calms me better than Xanax. There’s a reception area and five cubicles where the tattooing takes place, which are sterile. Ingrid watches me closely to be sure I don’t leave inky journalist fingerprints all over.
Ingrid De Quint (pictured right) is sensibly dressed, blonde hair neatly tied back. She started as a beautician before deciding to branch out into tattoo art, only to find the doors closed against her. “To learn to be a tattoo artist, you have to learn from an established tattoo artist, and they’re very wary about letting strangers into the circle,” she explains. “Only if you’re really lucky and find someone to take you on, can you do a sort of apprenticeship.”
Even then, many artists are reluctant to give away their secrets, including to pupils who will one day be competitors.
Ingrid went instead to Thailand, where she studied with a master of whom she speaks in almost mystical terms. “In Thailand and the US, I learned the technique,” she says. “But Albany, New York is where I learned how to pass it on to others and how a tattoo school is set up.”
Students pay €1,500 for a week’s tuition at the Antwerp school (€3,000 for two weeks, with a free tattoo machine thrown in), and they’re already tattooing on the third day. But first they learn some basic theory and hygiene.
A tattoo consists of thousands of puncture wounds going 1.5 mm into the skin up to 150 times a second, so everything has to be rigorously cleaned. That means wrapping everything in cling film: chair, table, instruments. The tattoo artist wears a mask and paper hood like a surgeon, as well as surgical gloves.
The students then learn how to manipulate the equipment, which works like a sewing machine, the needle going in and out thousands of times a minute. To make the learning curve a little easier, they practice on pigskin: hunks of bacon rind, essentially, which I’m rather disturbed to discover is an almost exact replica of human skin.
Then it’s on to real people, all of whom are volunteers, who receive their tattoos for free, and who sign away the right to complain if they don’t like the results. These are students, after all, and mistakes can happen. But Ingrid hovers ever-near, like a violin teacher in a room full of Stradivariuses, keeping an experienced eye on what’s going on.
At the first week, a student will have done six live tattoos; in the second week 10 more. Volunteers are always welcome.
www.ec4tattooart.net
I’m the world’s biggest softie, so when I tell you about the pain of being tattooed you can believe it: it doesn’t hurt a bit. Okay, it does hurt a bit, but only in the beginning. After a short time, your endorphins kick in and those, together with the boredom of keeping still for a long procedure, push the whole thing to the back of your mind. I went into the room expecting to faint, or at least to cry like a girly-man. But it was a breeze.
But first, you have to pick your design. Mine was a lizard, chosen from a book of hundreds of lizards. The design is photocopied and then traced onto old-fashioned carbon paper, which allows it to be transferred onto your skin. The positioning is important, since it’s going to be permanent, so make sure it’s to your satisfaction.
After you’ve been prepared, shaved if necessary, wiped down with an alcohol swab and your drawing lined up, it’s time for the moment of truth. “It’ll feel like a razor blade,” Ingrid warned me, and that was vaguely encouraging because I’d been expecting more of a Hilti nail-gun. But it is like a razor blade: you can feel the cut, but it isn’t all that painful because it’s so very sharp.
After the outline is done, the tattoo artist switches from a single needle to a cluster of nine for the filling-in, and that’s less sharp and less intense. My tattoo took less than an hour, by which time I was much less worried about being pierced with needles than about lying immobile on a table.
When the job is done, the after-care begins. The tattoo, which bleeds remarkably little, is covered with some antibiotic cream and a layer of cling-film to keep it protected in the first couple of hours. You’re supposed to use the cream for two weeks, but I decided not to because there are enough antibiotics in the world.
You’re advised not to scratch at any cost, which can be difficult. Regular rubbing with Vaseline soothes the itch (the tattoo site is not like an open wound; it’s more like a bad dose of sunburn) and also helps with sloughing off the top layer of skin to reveal the pristine image beneath. (Be warned: the skin tends to come off in big black chunks, not discrete single cells.)
Now two weeks later, the redness has subsided, the dead skin is gone and the itching has all but disappeared. Now my only thought it where my next tattoo is going to go.
1 Ötzi the Iceman, the Neolithic mummy found in the Alps in 1991, has about 57 simple tattoos over his body 2 The word “tattoo” comes from the Samoan tatau meaning “open wound” 3 Tattoos have often been used to identify dead bodies – one reason they were so popular with sailors like Popeye, who has an anchor tattooed on one of his giant forearms 4 The first electric tattoo machine was invented by Samuel O’Reilly in New York in 1891, based on an engraving machine 5 Brad Pitt got a tattoo in May 2007 of Ötzi the Iceman 5 tattoo facts
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