Matt Lodder

Inks have got a bit better.

Practice has got a bit cleaner.

You might be needles are now mass produced rather than kind of handmade.

But one of the beautiful things I think about this kind of historical depth of tattooing is just how comprehensible it is.

You know, like if any of your listeners have been tattooed and especially if they've been hand poked,

The sensations, the relationship they have with the person doing it and stuff would have been very, very similar to that experience that Otzi would have had five and a half thousand years ago.

I mean, historically, they sort of have been slightly in malls.

Like the first professional tattoo shops were, in London at least, were in the nice part of town.

One of them was on a street called German Street, which today still has tailors and art galleries and is very kind of a nice part of town.

Even as recently as the kind of 1990s and 2000s, there have been attempts to put tattoo shops into department stores.

But I think...

Even those aristocrats, even those posh people, even those middle class people who wanted to get tattooed still kind of appreciated, I think, as you said, the kind of image of tattooing as being something slightly rebellious, something slightly strange.

And many, many people over the century have tried to commercialize tattooing, have tried to make it this huge mass market business, sort of the McDonald's kind of business model.

But it's never quite taken off at all.

Precisely because you can't quite franchise a tattoo in the same way you can a burger or a t-shirt, right?

Yeah, so there are artists that do do that kind of thing.

It's called freehand, but you've got to be very confident in your tattooer to let them just kind of go wild with the machine.

A lot of in the mid-century and right up to the 1980s and stuff, tattooers would just, especially if it was stuff that they did a million times a day, like roses or swallows, they just bash those out with muscle memory.

They wouldn't need to draw them on.

But