A t 21, my father was getting ink etched into his ankle by an old man with a dirty needle wired up to a car battery in Goa. At 21, I was asking the woman who ran the tripe stall in Leeds Market about the cheapest place to buy tablecloths. There are some superficial differences between us, my father and me. Just surface stuff. Skin deep. While my pink, freckled body is blank and pictureless, my father's is an ink-splattered historical document.
It is a living, stretching archive. I can use my father's map of tattoos to navigate continents, relationships, families, journeys, marriages and deaths. Talking of journeys, after 28 years in Blighty, I have finally decided to renew my New Zealand passport. I am going back to the Land of the Long White Cloud to see the country my father left, for good, more than 30 years ago. But before leaving home, I embarked on another journey, a more emotional journey; a voyage round my father.
Using the pinpoints of his ink-injected skin, I wanted to meet my father anew, to fill in the dots of his life story, to discover why he left the home to which I am now returning. He got his first tattoo, a butterfly, in Melbourne after several sweaty months of building railways in the outback. That my father helped build the railways always makes him sound more like some wild-eyed Victorian industrialist than an earring-wearing builder.
But, after saving enough money, he headed to Melbourne: "I checked myself into a hotel and in one day I bought my first motorbike and got my first tattoo. The Honda was to "ride around Australia and just end up where I'd end up".
The tattoo was picked, on the spot, in the shop, after a slightly slurred pep talk from a stranger in a bar over the road. I didn't want anything with words or symbolism. It just felt like a classic stamp. The butterfly, his only coloured tattoo, is also my favourite. Its soft, fuzzy lines reflect the softening and sagging of an arm that once held me above rock pools and carried me up trees.
