The eponymous tattooist was a huge,
bearded old biker who sat behind a wooden bench, upon which were
arranged the electric tools of his trade. So far as I can recall, there
wasn't a clean needle or disinfected surface in sight.
"Blimey,"
Jock spat, "look what the f-ing cat dragged in. What's up with you two
-- speeding, or what?" We teeth-chatteringly admitted this was indeed
the case and Jock, not unkindly, took us to task: "I expect you little
toerags are paying well over the odds, you should come down 'ere to get
yer gear."
And with a flourish he
pulled a huge plastic bag full of amphetamines from behind his bench. We
quailed, suitably chastened, then bared our scrawny arms to receive
£9-worth of his indelible artistry. Mine, the head of a black puma, has
since been tattooed over.
Just shy
of four decades later I decided to cycle across town from Lambeth, the
south London neighborhood where I now live, up across the river and
northeast to King's Cross.
A
friend of mine, the artist Antony Gormley, was throwing his
65th-birthday party in his studio on Vale Royal where for the past 13
years he's constructed vast and steely artworks based on the form of his
own body.
When Gormley first moved
here, the area was still a characterful cocktail: one part scuzz to one
part light industry, and two of outright neglect.
"There
is no comparison" to the neighborhood today, he told me over tea in his
airy -- yet severely functional -- atelier, which was designed by David
Chipperfield. "Parts of King's Cross used to be like a bit of the
industrial West Midlands transposed to London -- there were those
fantastic charcoal-patinated walls, with big granite copingstones."
My
friend John and I had traveled in by Tube from our natal homes in the
north London 'burbs; we had £9 in cash between us and we were wired on
amphetamine "blues"-- speed pills that, at four for £1, were
attractively priced for teenaged punk rockers in the late 1970s. We were
en route to Jock's Tattoo Parlour, and perhaps this fact alone -- that
we had to journey across town to be inkily inscribed -- serves to
separate that era from this one, when no gentrifying London neighborhood
is complete without its own body-modification salon and most of the
city's inhabitants resemble Maori warriors going into battle.
Jock's
was a malodorous little nook on the scabrous section of the Pentonville
Road that runs east from King's Cross station. I say "runs," because
whatever the evolutionary end point of the massive redevelopment
currently under way in King's Cross, I doubt the thick miasma of
debauchery and desuetude that hangs over this dingy dell will ever be
dispelled.
In
1977 the road was dominated by the strange Victorian turret of the
Lighthouse Building and the Scala Cinema's lone cupola -- both
structures that remain in place today. John and I breasted the crowds of
office workers, warily eyed skulking prostitutes and drug dealers, then
dived into Jock's and stood there, quaking, in the gloomy
cigarette-stunk interior.
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