Clip joint: tattoos (video clips)

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Clip joint: tattoos
August 2010
Josh Du Sautoy
guardian.co.uk

"Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past." So said Jack London, though he probably didn't foresee the day when over a fifth of British adults would have one – that's a whole heap of interesting pasts.

Most of us will know someone with a tattoo, even if they're not willing to show it. Inking has definitely become a part of the mainstream, but in cinema it remains something of a novelty. A lot of film characters have become like politicians; make them as bland as possible so as not to offend anyone. Where are the tattooed romantic leads? Perhaps it has something to do with marketing, to paraphrase London: show me a man without a tattoo and I'll show you a product bland enough to tickle every demographic.

Whatever the reason, you can generally pigeonhole film characters with tattoos into psychos, gangsters and Angelina Jolie. But at least one thing is certain: these characters always have interesting pasts …

1) You can have tattoos to show your business partners what you have done, like Nikolai in Eastern Promises.

2) Perhaps it's simply a way of life, as it is for Mickey in Snatch.

3) Or, like Max Cady in Cape Fear, you might just want to scare people.

4) Leonard just needs an aide memoir in Memento.

5) Or, that old chestnut: to help dupe a widow into marrying you so you can get her late husband's loot, like Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter.