So, You Want A Face Tattoo? Under The Skin Of This Growing Trend

Horace Ridler, also known as The Great Omi (image credit: oliver // CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Horace Ridler, also known as The Great Omi, walks into a Waterloo Road tattoo shop. The artist, having received a letter of consent from his client’s wife, puts needle to skin. Ridler steps back into the open air with thick zebra stripes curving across his face. The year is 1934.

Eighty years later, a nineteen-year-old woman enters Whitechapel’s Seven Doors Tattoo, on the proviso that she’s getting her arm tattooed. Upon revealing she actually wants her OnlyFans name inscribed on her face, tattooist Rafel Delalande isn’t having any of it: ‘I told her no way’, he recounts, ‘I’m not playing a part in somebody possibly destroying their life’.

For The Great Omi – a war veteran who had gambled away his inheritance – a tattooed face secured his income. He became a successful sideshow performer, capitalising on the shock factor of his extreme look. It’s highly likely another artist said yes to the OnlyFans teenager, but it’s more difficult to predict how this tattoo will change her life.

‘When it comes to face tattoos, there’s a fine line between bravery and recklessness,’ says art historian Matt Lodder, ‘because ultimately, tattooing is a medium, not a phenomenon – it’s a conduit for some kind of meaningful expression, as much as it is for memeified shit.’

Since the 1880s, tattoo parlours have been operating in the capital. In the early days, tattoo artists posed as doctors and businessmen, donning white coats and stiff suits. Notable patrons of the art form included members of the royal family and Houses of Parliament, not just the much-stereotyped sailors. It was partially thanks to these high-profile fans that the practice remained legal (albeit newly regulated) after a man was charged with GBH for tattooing children – an event that engulfed the country in a moral panic. 

‘When it comes to face tattoos, there’s a fine line between bravery and recklessness.’

To clean up its act, the UK’s tattoo industry adopted a form of ethical gatekeeping. Tattoo equipment, previously purchasable from high-street department stores, became scarce, and rules around not tattooing hands, faces and sometimes even women were introduced. Artists presented themselves as modern professionals, even if they were ‘absolute ratbags’, explains Lodder. The tattoo industry, in an act of self-protection, became conservative: tattooers wanted business and understood visible tattoos were profit-damaging tabloid fodder. 

Selection of face tattoos inked by Grace Neutral (image credit: Grace Neutral)

But a face tattoo was never out of the question, if you knew where to go. It’s common, albeit uncomfortable, knowledge that a certain Portobello Road tattooist took sinister joy out of marking the faces of young men: ‘rather than refusing to do it, he’d almost be persuading them to get it done,’ said Alex Binnie, artist and founder of Into You, the UK’s first fully custom tattoo shop, which operated in Clerkenwell for twenty-three years. 

This individual was known as a ‘scratcher’: a predatory, unethical tattoo artist who produces low quality work. It was a label thrown at Binnie when he first started tattooing out of a squat in Bloomsbury, but (industry pioneering career aside) his attitude to his own face tattoo proves otherwise: ‘I told myself I’d wait until I was sixty, and if I still wanted it then, I’d get it done’.

‘When I first got my face tattooed and walked down the street, I felt a bit like when I was seventeen and dyed my hair blue – it was a thrill.’

For Binnie, an inked face was the ultimate tattoo, ‘it’s the most visible… how we look and present ourselves to the world is important, and I wanted to grow old with a face tattoo’. He flicks between sincerity and self-deprecating mischief; it’s an apt embodiment of the components of a good tattoo – a considered, intentional risk. ‘It’s kind of childish,’ he continues, ‘but when I first got my face tattooed and walked down the street, I felt a bit like when I was seventeen and dyed my hair blue – it was a thrill.’  

An interest in other artforms and a general rule against tattooing people in areas he doesn’t already have them himself means few faces have been permanently marked by Binnie. Nevertheless, he attributes the rising popularity of face tattoos to the ‘desire to always go one step further… us tattooed people, we’re attention seekers, really. Show me a heavily tattooed person who’s not an exhibitionist, and I’ll show you a liar.’ 

Tattooist Rafel Delalande (image credit: Julien Lachaussee)

It doesn’t get more heavily tattooed than Rafel Delalande. Bare branches stretch across his forehead, eyelids, cheeks and chin. After traversing the bridge of his nose they come to a stop, there’s a flash of virgin skin, before more elemental curves point to the jigsaw of individual pieces which fit together across the back of his skull. The rest of his body is similarly covered; his first tattoo – a tribute to his childhood favourite, The Little Prince – now resides under a layer of grisly folk horror. 

‘I’ve always liked the word “freak”,’ says Delalande, explaining he’s not bothered by the wide-eyed looks and open mouths that he sometimes attracts. He’s been a tattoo artist for twenty-two years, and ‘got visible tattoos early on, when it was still taboo to get hand and neck pieces.’ As a result, he’s careful with the tattoos he does, and rarely inks faces. ‘I’ve seen first-hand how much face tattoos change your life. They’re popular now, but trends fade; why get your face tattooed for a trend?’

Social media is the face tattoo trend super-spreader, according to Delalande. ‘We’ve seen too many tattooers who confuse themselves, unsure if they are influencers or artists. They just want to be famous, and in the process, viewers online have become anaesthetised to the extremity of a face tattoo.’

‘We used to call them MySpace bodysuits’, jokes Matt Lodder, ‘when you represent yourself to the world through a profile picture, getting your hand, neck and face tattooed and then wearing a hoodie means you can look like a heavily tattooed person for cheap’. It’s a competitiveness fostered by false online realities.  

‘I’ve always liked the word “freak”.’

MySpace had its moment in the same era that hip-hop went mainstream. The genre lionises American prison and gang culture, which face tattoos are part of, (‘it’s about more than just looking hard, it’s a way of fucking up your life, forcing members into a lifelong dedication to the gang,’ explains Lodder). Add in the accelerating powers of social media, and a couple of decades later, Joe Bloggs sees the face tattoos of mucisians like Tekashi 6ix9ine and Lil Wayne and thinks, ‘I want that’. 

But the old ways of tattooing, while diminished, still haunt London’s most reputable tattoo artists: ‘When I started, the elders would tell me there are rules’, says Grace Neutral, founder of Hackney’s Femme Fatale Tattoo, TV presenter and now host of celebrity YouTube Series Under Your Skin. Neutral retaliated: ‘I was a wild, intense extremist, and was like: [in a bratty voice] “fuck you! This is tattooing; the wild west, where pirates reside, and I want my face tattooed!’’’

Grace Neutral (image credit: Grace Neutral)

‘But I came to understand the rules. Ten or fifteen years ago, tattooing wasn’t as accepted, and to say people are getting face tattoos and not regretting it is a lie.’

Since then, Neutral has done a lot to her face, including tattooing the whites of her eyes. She’s also worked on countless faces of others: ‘it’s one of my favourite parts of the body to tattoo,’ she admits, ‘because of the trust – you look at it every day, you lead with your face, it’s your postcard – so it makes me feel very special when people ask me to do that.’

‘A face tattoo might make some parts of your life harder, but it won’t endanger it.’

Neutral points to the fact that as humans, we’re always looking to modify how we look, whether it’s for aesthetics or confidence. ‘A face tattoo is still extreme, but I would consider a BBL [referring to the dangerous cosmetic procedure, Brazilian butt lift] more so,’ caveats Neutral. ‘Physically, women put themselves through very extreme things to fit into an ideal style of beauty – procedures, pain, blood, sweat, tears. A face tattoo might make some parts of your life harder, but it won’t endanger it.’

A BBL does the opposite of a face tattoo, it’s part of an industry that homogenises bodies and faces, making unique bodies uniform. ‘My problem with plastic surgery is that we’re not doing weirder things with it,’ laments Lodder, ‘but face tattoos permit experimental forays into freakiness without the invasiveness of going under the knife.’ He sees the rise of face tattoos as not just linked to social media, but also to our acceptance of them as a Western culture. But for that reason, there’s also a stagnation. Lodder notes people are no longer actively pushing boundaries, ‘we’ve got lots of bad artists and bad tattoos.’ A face tattoo is no different from any modern art – it’s not enough to be transgressive, it must be purposeful, and self-aware. 

Rob Zombie (image credit: Colin R. Singer // CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

‘Face tattoos permit experimental forays into freakiness.’

But it’s not always clear cut. Rick Genest, or ‘Zombie Boy’, lived on the streets of Montreal as a teenager. He wanted his face tattooed like a skeleton, but his artist refused. A short while later, Genest returns to the tattooist with just his eye sockets blacked out. Having ‘ruined’ his face, he wanted his artist to finish the job, and soon, his whole body was tattooed with a skeleton. Like The Great Omi years before him, Genest’s tattoos granted social ascension. He was on Thierry Mugler’s catwalk, was featured in a Lady Gaga video, and there’s a statue of him in the Science Museum.

‘For him, fucking up his face was the best thing he ever did,’ said Lodder. ‘It looked like he was being reckless, but actually, he was being brave.’ It seems that just like the tattoos themselves, the reasons for getting them done have to be personal, and true to you.