– His name is Moondog.
The tattoo machine sounds like a small, intensive drill. Emil Särelind sits leaning over Simon Allzén’s upper arm, concentrated, close to the tattoo. It will be a picture of the composer and cult artist Moondog.
In the studio in Björkhagen outside Stockholm, the walls from floor to ceiling are covered with drawings, cutouts and pictures. Bookmarking angels are crowded with cartoon monsters and a large image of the skin in cross-section that looks like it was from a biology hall in the 70’s.
Simon Allzén has a doctorate in philosophy from Stockholm University and has had several tattoos before.
What is your relationship with Moondog?
– I think he is a fun character and makes pretty good music. And I think it’s a nice picture, he says.
Pretty good music. It gives a fairly clear picture of the view of tattoos today. It does not have to be more or less than a nice picture of a person who makes pretty good music. Many times there is even less significance behind a tattoo than this one by Moondog. And there is a power in that it does not have to mean that much, says the tattoo artist Emil Särelind.
In the past, tattoos have so often been about the meaning behind. In the early 2000s, when the TV series Miami Ink aired on MTV, they were made in memory of a dead relative, as a tribute to a mother or as a friendship tattoo.
That today’s tattoos increasingly rarely have an underlying, deeper meaning, Emil Särelind believes, is because you no longer need to justify your tattoo with a meaning.
– It is not as stigmatized now, so it is perhaps easier to do this, he says and points to one of his drawings, a lion under which it says “Lion mistress (naked)”.
His customers find him on Instagram, then under the tattoo name Frogmagik. They like his style and book an appointment, often without having decided what they want.
Tattoos have been around long – the oldest known sit on the iceman Ötzi, who was kept frozen in a glacier for over five thousand years and was found in 1991. He is believed to have tattooed himself as a way to relieve pain. In ancient times, tattoos were used to mark slaves, but with the advent of Christianity, the art of tattooing disappeared almost completely in Europe. Fred Andersson, associate professor of art history with a focus on visual communication, says that Europeans then began to see it as something ugly and bad to be tattooed.
In the western world, it was then mainly sailors who got tattoos – they traveled to places where tattoos still existed. The sailor tattoos became their own genre, today also called old school. At the Maritime History Museum, there are a large number of tattoo models in such a style, many of them are believed to have been made in Denmark. They are characterized by the fact that they are made with certain basic colors, have hard black shades and contain Christian symbols.
– But since they came from other parts of the world, there were also, for example, Japanese and Chinese elements, says Mirja Arnshav, research coordinator at the Maritime History Museum.
Others who were tattooed were criminals, prostitutes and circus performers. But not only that, because in the 1860s, the British Crown Prince Edward XII traveled to Palestine and got a tattoo, which was considered very eccentric and something that the British upper class followed. However, this did not affect the public’s view of tattoos which were still strongly negative.
It was not until the 1980s that tattoos became more common in Europe. Just then due to a changed view of the body and a culture that was often linked to an alternative view of society.
– There was a rebellion. I think of punk, hard rock, hip hop, says Fred Andersson.
To show their affiliation, people tattooed themselves. And when the media started showing tattoos, they even reached young people who did not belong to these groups. In this way, tattoos spread and became more and more a part of the general popular culture.
An example is the trend with tribal tattoos: It started with patterns from tribes, but mixed and when more and more people tattooed them but fewer and fewer knew what they stood for, they lost their original meaning and became rather trendy patterns.
Does it hurt?
– Yes a little, says Simon Allzén.
Soon the picture of Moondog is ready. We’re talking about the pain. You have to go into yourself and sometimes it is even difficult to talk in the meantime.
– You have to deal with pain in the head.
Emil Särelind explains that 20 years ago there were five large tattoo studios in Stockholm that had more or less a monopoly on tattoos.
– The old traditional studio was more like a motorcycle club. It was almost only men and they were conservative and wanted things to be done in certain ways.
When he opened the studio in Björkhagen seven years ago, the climate had just begun to crack. Much thanks to Instagram, new tattoo artists were able to reach customers without going through the established studios.
Then an expression that had previously been controlled was suddenly released. And it turned out that there are both tattooists and customers to create a completely new wave of tattoos. Their capital is Berlin and the queer community, which stands in clear contrast to what tattoos used to be, is an important part.
The question of what which is trendy to tattoo in right now is hard to answer. There is so much, it’s so mixed.
Emil Särelind himself draws animals, monsters and things in a style he calls ignorant. He sees it as something of a backlash against the seriousness that surrounded the tattoos before. The seriousness as in the meaning behind the Miami Ink tattoos but also the seriousness in the pictures themselves. In the early 2000s, both tattoo machines and inks became so good that you could make photorealistic tattoos. It became a trend, not least among football players. Ignorant is the opposite.
– That’s probably the case in art. When you start to be able to do something more precise and someone becomes very good at it, in the end the young people get tired and want to do something completely different.
He turns to Simon Allzén – Moondog is done.