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Alberto García-Alix
My friends advised me not to. My girlfriend didn't want to come with me; all her interest was centred on the dealer coming round... with the dose we both needed. I decided to pluck up all the courage I had. I went alone. The appointment was at five, one August evening in Ibiza. In a sweat, I caught the bus at four...still sweating I also walked for a bit, sweating I asked one local and then another until I finally found the house. The crazy English guy who opened the door to me was a bit tipsy. Without the slightest enthusiasm he prepared the equipment, although "prepared" is an overstatement, as he didn't even change the needles. He just put dye in a few small caps, then he lit the machine and with its squeaky, humming sound filling the air, lazily asked me what I wanted. Almost twenty years later I wrote a text for a magazine where I related, in my own way, why I had done it. I'll go over it again... "I was younger then. I used to dream and so in my dreams, an angel once shouted into my ear: "To enter heaven you must be tattooed. He repeated it a couple of times. Then the echo of his voice gradually faded away, without my finding out whether to obtain such a prize I should tattoo myself from head to foot or just a little bit..."
Today, it's obvious to anyone that I did not disregard such celestial advice. My body... arms, hands, neck and chest are covered in tattoos and, as a result of this affinity, it is impossible to avoid a certain person coming into my mind; the main character from a story by Ramón Gomez de la Serna, who was obsessed with tattooing himself and whose pains the doctors could always locate exactly, much better than for any other patient: "You have the disease in the elephant's wedding...", they would say. Now, without any need for doctors, I also know that a certain mal, the stigma of an old guilt, I carry irremediably with me and it reminds me of this always, that tattoo I acquired that warm evening in August in Ibiza. But that's another story... Let's talk about tattoos. Since man has walked erect and has been homo sapiens, the need to magnify the beauty of his body through artificial means has spurred a universal way of behaving. It has always been done and always will. It responds to an evolutionary and positive constant of humanity. The techniques used for this are many and varied and differ depending on the culture and period. One of the most ancestral techniques of ornamentation to alter the natural appearance of the body is tattoos. It consists of inserting a non-soluble pigment -it used to be soot, nowadays it's dye- into the skin using a fine chisel, so that this produces a visible and permanent mark or drawing which is usually blue or black. That indelible permanence, along with the pain caused by breaking the skin and the release of vital energy -blood- are the keys which have given the tattoo a mystic, magical and undoubtedly hermetic significance.
In the magazine Tattoo Gazette, published in New York, one of its authors, Frank Snake Allen offers us an entertaining and perhaps true theory on its beginnings: "the tattoo -he says- originated at some moment between the period of scratching in the dirt and rupestrian painting. It simply appeared when a few clumsy people fell on the ground and landed on top of a scorched stick, and someone noticed the mark which was left after the wound had healed..." It may have been that way. Why not? The fact is that the most primitive tangible evidence we have is scarce, but certain Palaeolithic artefacts have been classified as tattooing instruments. In its remote origins, in primitive communities and societies, a person was always tattooed to lead him or her in some way towards a relationship with the uncertain, but eternal, idea of God. (…)
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