Sagging angels, wilting lilies, drooping lines from love sonnets, withered swallows, flaccid snakes, limp dragons, shrivelled babies’ names: this will be the view inside the British bathroom, and at the British seaside, and in British hospital beds and morgues, in 2060, when today’s tattoo-wearers now in their prime will be in their seventies and eighties. 

None of us thinks we’re going to grow old, but (as happened so cruelly to 1960s rock stars) age will creep up, and the skin will stretch, even that of the handsomest, healthiest tattoo trendsetters with the best body art money can buy.

One such is David Beckham, whose four birds flying up from the floral foliage on his neck towards his left ear and on towards the mini-solar system on his head we gazed at while watching the Beckham four-parter on Netflix, aware that those were just a tiny fraction of the 80 or so tattoos covering his torso and limbs, on which there is now hardly any space left. ‘I’m not even worried,’ Beckham said when asked what his tattoos will look like when he’s old. It will be fascinating to see if he keeps them when his neck gets scraggy. 

The language has changed from that of remorse to that of just changing your mind

Tattoos have entered the mainstream, as showcased by the angels-and-saints-inked upper and lower arms of the new Precentor of Canterbury, Wendy Dalrymple, who displays them proudly in her official Church of England photo, wearing a sleeveless black clerical blouse. The Revd Alan Moss, Anglican priest in Walthamstow, otherwise known as ‘the Illustrated Priest’, thinks of his tattooed body as a living stained-glass window, telling the stories of the Bible to the public. 

Doctors, lawyers, bankers and the Met Police are regular customers among the increasingly middle-class and moneyed clients at my local parlour in Fulham, Ink’d. It’s not craziness or vanity, say the tattoo generation; it’s self-expression, a hoarding, treasuring and displaying of favourite memories, places, beloveds and beliefs. For Generation Rent, a tattoo is, as one inked 28-year-old explained to me: ‘The one thing in the world you can truly own.’ I do worry, though, that today’s young might look a bit ridiculous covered from head to toe in what may in four decades’ time seem dated and primitive designs, and that this will be another reason for the future young not to have any respect for the future old, who’ll be carrying their personal life stories and creeds on their wrinkled skin. 

We who fret about such things can relax a bit, because the tattoo-removal market is booming. ‘What’s done can be undone’ is the message. The technology of removal has improved so much that the prospect of pain is no longer the first concern of the tattoo-remorseful. The main hurdles are the time and the cost. The tattoo-removal specialist Aoife at NAAMA in Great Portland Street, a haven of friendliness and light, tells me that with their excellent LightSense laser system, total removal requires from eight to 12 sessions, with each session ‘only’ three or four weeks apart, meaning that you’re talking ‘months, not years’ to remove a tattoo. Each session costs a minimum of £140, rising to £340, so costs run quickly into the thousands. 

Expecting tattoo-removal parlours to be theatres of self-flagellation and clinics of remorse, I was surprised. The language of tattoo removal has changed from that of remorse to that of just changing your mind. You no longer say ‘I loathe my tattoo’. You say, ‘It no longer resonates with me’ or ‘It no longer speaks to me’. In all likelihood, you’re just getting rid of one tattoo from the extensive collection on your body. ‘It’s all about investing time in yourself,’ Aoife explains. ‘It’s not about regret, not about shame.’ To remove or change tattoos is as normal, she says, as changing the pictures on your walls.

Today’s removal specialists tend to have tattoos of their own, so the first thing they say to customers is: ‘I love your tattoos!’ It’s all positive and celebratory, with just a quiet nod towards the dark side of unwanted tattoos – the broken love affair, the ex-partner you want to banish forever from your dermis and epidermis. 

The real war going on is between the different methods of removal practised and preached by the different practitioners. It’s Pico vs Q-switch: both forms of laser removal, but working at different intensities of laser pulse. I came away from NAAMA convinced that its ‘Pico’ system was the best in the world, having had explained to me that it was the gentlest, least painful and most effective, emitting 34 times less energy than other systems. I also listened to joyous testimonials on the phone from satisfied clients who said it didn’t hurt, and saw convincing ‘before’ and ‘after’ skin photos on the walls. I then went to visit Jade, the tattoo-removal specialist at Ink’d on the North End Road. She told me that her Q-switch method works much better than the Pico one, which, she said, is good at breaking down and removing black ink particles, but doesn’t work so well for colours. ‘A woman came in who’d had 12 Pico sessions,’ she told me, ‘and the tattoo hadn’t changed at all. It was advertised as pain-free and faster. But she’d wasted all that money and had to start again.’ 

Jade did admit that with the Q-switch system, with its more intensive laser pulse bursts, you have to wait from four to six weeks between sessions, giving the skin time to heal between each one. That sounds painful. NAAMA customers mentioned too that this method can feel like being burned with hot bacon grease. So you’ll be entering a world of more pain, and will need to think in terms of a year rather than months. 

To have a full ‘sleeve’ removed at Ink’d, says the owner, Kiano (who showed me his flawless tattoos of his grandfather, the Queen, the Godfather, Denzel Washington and Benjamin Franklin on his arms and legs), will cost you about £15,000, which is almost four times as much as it would cost to have that same sleeve done in the parlour’s very snazzy ground floor, which has boasted Brooklyn Beckham (70 of whose 100 tattoos are dedicated to his wife, Nicola Peltz) among its clients. It’s reassuring for customers, even ones as ‘till death us do part’ as Brooklyn Beckham, to know that a removal parlour is just downstairs in case it should ever be needed.