In pictures: Dimbleby's not alone - other surprise figures with a tattoo
The jokes have already started doing the rounds on the internet. “Just seen Dimbleby park his Harley outside Leather-Jackets-R-Us,” said Jack Dee.
“My red dragon tattoo has never been seen in public, and never will,” said Huw Edwards, another BBC man, in jest.
Even Dimbleby’s niece has quipped that Peter Snow will have to get his tongue pierced to keep up.
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12 Nov 2013David Dimbleby gets his first tattoo, aged 75
12 Nov 2013Not many stories are proper marmalade-droppers, but this was one of them: David Dimbleby, voice of the establishment and Bullingdon Club alumnus, has had a drawing of a scorpion inked on his back at the ripe old age of 75.
He had the “artwork” (we will brush over the fact the scorpion is missing two legs or that it is, supposedly, a symbol of being HIV positive within the gay community) done while filming a documentary about Britain’s seafaring past.
Amid the gasps of surprise, there has been a snobbish undercurrent that tattoos are just not suitable for a presenter of Question Time. Squaddies, brickies and navvies may have inkings up their arms, so too professional footballers, but not a Dimbleby. It seems as declassé as the Duke of Edinburgh picking up a Filet-o-fish from the Windsor branch of McDonald’s.
As Pieter van der Merwe, a curator at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, which has chronicled the tattooing tradition in the Navy, says: “Oh dear, oh dear. When I was brought up it was something only the lower orders did. Nice, middle-class people didn’t have tattoos.”
Dimbleby is unrepentant, however. “I have always wanted a tattoo. I thought I might as well have it done now. It’s a dream come true for me.”
Tattoos may be indelibly linked to Britain’s naval past, but the fashion for them has ebbed and flowed as frequently as the tide in the Bristol Channel.
It is a myth that they were unheard of in Britain until Captain Cook brought back tales and drawings of Polynesian islanders’ spectacular inkings, known as “tatau”, which often covered their faces in the 18th century. True, this is the first time these were referred to as tattoos, but English pilgrims, rich and poor, had already been getting “markings” or “stainings” centuries ago on trips to the Holy Land. Having a Jerusalem Cross on the chest was a common memento, according to Matt Lodder, a lecturer in History of Art at Essex University, who is writing a book on tattoos.
WATCH: Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman pays tribute to Dimbleby's tattoo
The voyages of Captain Cook, however, did help popularise the art form. Although, Sir Joseph Banks, who served as a botanist on Cook’s first voyage, said he was baffled why anyone would decorate themselves in this manner.
“Possibly superstition may have something to do with it,” he concluded. “Nothing else in my opinion could be a sufficient cause for so apparently absurd a custom.” And yet, as have many others who first pooh-poohed the decorations, he ended up getting one himself along with most of the crew.
A very different seaman of that period – Fletcher Christian, the leading mutineer on HMS Bounty – had the three-legged Manxman symbol tattooed on his chest, marking his family’s links to the Isle of Man.
By the end of the 19th century it is estimated that 90 per cent of the Royal Navy had tattoos and they were not confined to those below deck. Lord Charles Beresford, the son of the Marquess of Waterford, who was Admiral of the Fleet before the First World War, had an enormous tattoo all the way down his back depicting a fox-hunting scene. “With the fox disappearing you know where, with just his tail showing,” according to Dr van der Merwe. “This was not unique to Beresford. Plenty of officers had fox-hunting scenes.”
From this respectable base the fashion spread, so that the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th century was a period when tattoos were very much in vogue with high society.
In fact, none other than Prince Bertie (later Edward VII) was first tattooed in 1862 in the Holy Land with the Jerusalem Cross. It is thought the Prince went on to have more decorations and his sons, the Duke of Clarence and the Duke of York (later King George V), kept up the family tradition while serving overseas in the Royal Navy, with George having a dragon inked on his arm in Japan. This was a time when all things Japanese, from furniture to porcelain, were fashionable.
Another frequenter of the tattoo parlour was supposedly Jennie Churchill, Winston’s mother, who was said to have a snake on her wrist. Churchill himself is meant to have had an anchor on his forearm, but Lodder says there is scant evidence that either tattoo existed. Rupert Soames, Churchill’s grandson, says he never saw it and if there ever was a family tradition, it has died out.
Lodder notes that quite a few aristocratic women had tattoos that would have been covered by clothing and seen only by their lovers. Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, had one on her leg, which only came to light in the 1930s when hemlines started to rise. Then in her sixties, she was baffled by the fuss.
By the middle of last century tattoos lost their pretensions to grandeur. In part, this was because of the invention of the twin-coil electromagnetic tattoo needle, patented in 1891 in New York, which meant that tattoos became affordable for the working man. Previously, they had been achieved by a slow and costly manual tapping technique.
Lodder believes that there was also, in the years after the war, a general rejection of decoration – in architecture and furniture, as well as body art – as “part of the general trend of modernism”.
But all trends come and go. By the time I was a student in Oxford in the early 1990s, nearly all the in-crowd were at it, with the Eagle tattoo parlour on the Cowley Road as popular as Freud’s cafe with the smart set keen to shock their parents.
David Cameron’s wife Samantha famously has a small dolphin on her right ankle; society heiress Willa Keswick, whose family are worth £1.7 billion, has a six-inch red gun on her torso; Martha Swire, heir to a rival mercantile fortune, has a shark on her foot; while David de Rothschild has five arrows – the family crest – on his right foot.
For all the requests for huge Cheryl Cole “tramp stamps”, which spread across the lower back, there must almost be as many for family crests in trendy tattoo parlours. Half of Team GB at last year’s Olympics, including many of the private school educated rowers and cyclists, had the Olympic rings inked on their arms.
If anything, Dimbleby’s inking is not a sign that tats have finally become mainstream, but that they have reached their sell-by-date. During the height of the David Beckham tattoo-a-week era, Selfridges had its own parlour, but it shut last year and moved to Topshop.
Indeed, with so many pensioners embracing tattoos, one could argue inkings have lost their power to shock. Today, having a tattoo is no more rebellious than a tot of rum in your evening Horlicks. Or, as Dr van der Merwe puts it: “I am astonished how people claim to assert their individuality, and then behave like sheep.”
His critics may harp, but at least Dimbleby chose, at 75, to stamp his mark in a fairly harmless style. As he says: “You are only old once.”
Tattoo? You too?
Samantha Cameron
David Cameron’s wife has a small dolphin on her right ankle.
Theodore Roosevelt
The former US president had his family crest across his chest. It depicts a rose bush on a grassy mound, with the motto: Qui plantavit curabit (He who planted will preserve).
Dorothy Parker
The American poet and writer had a small star on the inside of her left arm as a memento of a drunken night in the 1930s. She later wore long-sleeved dresses to cover her mistake.
Lady Steel
The wife of the former Liberal Democrat leader David Steel had a pink spotted jaguar tattooed onto a shoulder for her 70th birthday.
Caroline Kennedy
The American diplomat has a small butterfly on her right forearm.
George Orwell
The 1984 author had a reminder of his days as a policeman in colonial Burma on his knuckles in the form of bright blue dots. Its tribesmen believed tattoos were magic symbols that would repel bullets.
King Harold
The king had his wife’s name, Edith, etched across his chest. His romantic gesture helped his allies recover his body after the battle of Hastings.
Tsar Nicholas II
In 1891, Nicholas II visited Japan to improve Russo-Japanese relations. He returned with a dragon on his right arm.
Thomas Edison
The lightbulb inventor invented the electric pen, the predecessor to the tattoo gun. He had a quincunx, a geometric pattern of five dots, inked on his forearm.
In pictures: Dimbleby's not alone - other surprise figures with a tattoo
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