The Point of the Needle

Words by Shannon Devy

It’s a dazzling summer Saturday morning in Cape Town, and I’m washing down a Nosh bar with a Coke in a parking lot in Gardens. I’ve got a needle phobia and a tattoo booked across the street, so I’m raising my blood sugar in preparation. I neck the rest of the soda, lock the car, and push through the doors of the famous TOMB tattoo.

It’s probably the sugar, but I feel cheerful. The shop is a riot of colour. Part shrine, part fever dream, it’s packed from floor to 10-foot-ceiling with an unfathomable range of curiosities – stacks of skulls, hundreds of framed artworks, a werewolf head, old movie posters, reams of flash from the 80s and 90s, and, of course, the extensive Japanese toy collection of TOMB’s late founder, Nicolas Mudskipper. I’m booked in with Bruce the Kid today, and once the size of the design is decided and the stencil placed, he fires up his gun, and we’re away. 

In the Western world, the earliest physical evidence we have of tattooing is found on the body of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy discovered in the Alps, who sported an impressive 61 tattoos across his body, many of which served as therapeutic cures for ailments or protective charms. In Africa, body modification is an ancient practice dating back over 5000 years. Across the African continent, from Chad to Uganda, Senegal to Nigeria, Nambia to Egypt, tattooing and scarification have served deep social, therapeutic, magical and customary purposes for hundreds of thousands of years. 

Back in the contemporary world, as Bruce’s tattoo gun buzzes away, I wonder about the point of a dolphin ankle tattoo. What function do tattoos have, outside of these ancient cultural contexts? If I ever fell into a bog or similar, only to be dug up 5000 years in the future, I wonder what the sentient AIs would think of my collection as their microscopic nano bots work to restore my hide. Would my cute dancing skeleton holding a coffee cup and a cigarette tell them anything about white Western culture in the mid 2020s? 

I ask Bruce what he thinks brings people through the doors. “I think people have control issues,” he says, “and you can’t be in control when you’re getting tattooed…it’s a huge letting go, and it’s a huge trust in a stranger. I think that’s the addictive part of it all...You have to give in, no matter how in control you are of your own life.” Face down on Bruce’s table with my arm bent awkwardly behind my back, I realise this hadn’t occurred to me. There’s certainly a lot of trust involved in getting tattooed, but I would have thought the process has more to do with identity and autonomy. Do I have control issues? I wonder. I crane my neck to try to see what Bruce is doing.

Bruce the Kid has been tattooing for 13 years, which I feel is just about long enough to trust him with a forearm. He started as a fine artist – a painter and sculptor. Then he went and got a tattoo, and fell in love with the artform. After a bit of a learning curve, he settled into a style he really liked. His work is, in my opinion, absolutely remarkable, often combining photo-realistic elements with an almost child-like cartoon style, all rendered in the most delicate, masterful linework. Like many other tattoo artists, he has a keen sense of being a part of something very, very old. 

“The communities within tattooing are incredible. The respect for older stuff is insane.” He points to a framed picture of the legendary Jimmy Adams sitting in his shop in Woodstock. Adams set up one of the first (if not the first) tattoo shops in Cape Town, operating first in Simon’s Town, then the famous Hanover Street in District Six, and finally Woodstock Lower Main Road. He serviced foreign sailors as they passed through Cape Town in the 60s, tattooing them with, at first, three needles stuck to a matchstick, then with a machine he designed and hand-welded himself. “If someone were to come in with one of his tattoos, and they want to touch it up, no one in here will touch it,” says Bruce. Jimmy Adams was still tattooing at 78. He passed away in 2012, but his grandchildren continue his legacy, with tattoo shops of their own. 

After about an hour, Bruce powers down his gun and leans back to inspect his work. He gives a little nod – done – then carefully wraps my new tattoo in a thin, sticky sheet of flexible plastic called “second skin”. It’ll hopefully heal up cleanly under its covering. No swimming or sun until then. And as I walk back to my car, I’m struck by the same feeling I always have walking out of a tattoo parlour after getting a new tattoo – a sense of being a little bit more myself than I was when I walked in.

TOMB TATTOO

@tomb_tattoo