Lal Hardy interview: ‘You can’t be too much of a preacher to people’

A screaming buzz greets you as you push through the door of New Wave Tattoo in leafy Muswell Hill. But this isn’t a dentist’s office – you won’t find any teeth being drilled or people in white coats behind the counter. What you will find instead is a man with tattoos spilling down his arms and onto his knuckles, scraping a buzzing needle full of black ink across the forearm of a wincing customer. This isn’t your ordinary, run of the mill tattooist – this is Lal Hardy, the man who tattooed London.

With his polo shirt, shaved head, gold tooth and thick, inked arms, Lal Hardy looks like the ultimate middle-aged skinhead – the kind you find by the barrel-load every Saturday, drinking before the football at pubs across the city. But this North London hardman helped shape one of the most popular artforms of the modern era. He was there with the punks in the ‘70s, and he’s been the figurehead of the London tattoo world ever since.

For 15 years he was the secretary of the Association of Professional Tattoo Artists, he’s represented the trade against MPs desperate to legislate against it, he’s been on TV, he’s been on the news, he’s written books, and he’s tattooed more celebs than you’ve had hot dinners. From Liam Gallagher and Marc Almond to what seems like pretty much every professional footballer in England, he’s done them all. When you walk down Oxford Street, or when you flick through a copy of Heat at WH Smith while waiting for your train, chances are that you’ll see his inky work staring out at you. Hardy is the man who helped bring the art of tattooing kicking and screaming into the British mainstream.

‘When I first started tattooing in the mid-1970s in London, tattooing wasn’t the industry or the trade that it is now,’ he tells me as he finishes off a praying hands design on a regular customer. ‘Your main sort of clients were a predominantly white, male, working class group.’ He goes on to describe a clientele-base sourced almost entirely from the military, navy and criminal classes. A world away from the tattooed bankers and Kardsashians of today.

It was Hardy’s involvement in the nascent punk scene that helped cement his reputation. ‘Back in the day it wasn’t uncommon for the police to pull you up when they saw your multi-coloured hair and tattoos,’ he says. This wasn’t the punk rock of the Clash or the Sex Pistols though. ‘The early punk movement didn’t grasp the tattoo scene in the same way that the next generation of bands like The Exploited and the Anti-Nowhere League did. I think it maybe became a little bit more working class.’ Those punk rockers would bring record covers and band logos to Lal to get tattooed, making his shop a prime punk destination in the early ‘80s.

It wasn’t just the clientele that was different then, London was a harsher place too, and a tattooist wasn’t just some tough guy whose only job was to draw a dragon on your arm. ‘When I started tattooing, you had to be a bit of a showman and a bit of a comedian,’ he says, before taking a break to tell me about his time spent learning how to tattoo with a long-dead Scottish tattooist called Big Jock on Pentonville Road. ‘Kings Cross in the 1970s was a violent area. It was full of prostitution and it was where the pimps targeted the young girls coming off the trains. There was a big alcohol and drug problem too, and we used to be in the shop and see this all happening, so Jock always used to say that you’ve got to be the bouncer, you’ve got to be the father confessor and you’ve got to be the agony aunt.’

Hardy’s happy to admit that the tattoo world is a gentler place now, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. ‘Years ago, each town probably had one or two tattooists and those characters were seen as a little bit whacky or off the wall, you know? Now you just see tattooing absolutely everywhere. A little bit of the mysticism that went with it has disappeared. But you can never hold anything back in one place, everything progresses forward.’ And as London has become a nicer place to live, so has tattooing become more respectable. Hardy points to changes in society as a whole that have allowed tattooing to flourish. ‘There are so many changes that have happened in what’s acceptable and what’s tolerated if you look at race relations or sexuality and it’s the same in tattooing. We live in a much more liberal society. When I was a kid people weren’t allowed to express themselves, and I think we’ve got a lot more freedoms now.’

There’s no denying that the mysticism is gone. What was once a statement – what could once, genuinely, shock – is now little more than fashion. And anyone who has a terrible tattoo of a butterfly above their arse, or the Chinese symbol for ‘pillock’ that they got on their gap year, will know that regret is the biggest repercussion to the popularity of tattoos. Hardy rattles off a list of the tattoo trends he’s had to cover over: cartoon Taz devils, barbwire armbands, Celtic crosses, eternity symbols, From Dusk Till Dawn-style tribal sprawls. ‘But when you’re a business and you’ve got bills to pay, you can’t be too judgemental,’ he says wryly.

Not that Lal hasn’t made his own mistakes. After all, what punk hasn’t done their own fair share of dumb shit? ‘I got a tattoo of a teddy boy cos I thought I’d be a teddy boy for life, I had a big quiff and all that, and suddenly me hair fuckin’ fell out. I got that covered up. I’ve made mistakes, so I understand.’ He helps guide his customers away from bad decisions, ‘but experience is what you get five minutes after you need it, so you can’t be too much of a preacher to people.’

He’ll be set up near the front at this year’s tattoo convention, just like he is every year, selling his wares and tattooing those brave enough to go under the needle. But don’t be scared of him if you decide he’s the tattooist for you this September, because this massive scary skinhead, this frightening, intimidating legend of London tattooing might be hard as nails, and a wizard with a needle, but he’s not half as mean as he looks.