Part 32

The tattoo artist is a person of some consequence. He has a knowledge of London that makes most Londoners sick, and his acquaintance with queer and casual characters is illimitable. He was swollen with good food and drink, and as he extended a strong right arm to greet us, he positively shed a lustre of success and power. The state of business in all trades and professions may be heartbreakingly bad, but there is one profession in which there are no bad seasons--one that will survive and flourish until the world ceases to play the quaint comedy of love. All the world loves a lover, and none more so than the tattoo artist, or, to give him his professional name, Professor Sylvanus Ruffino, the world's champion, whose studio is in Commercial Road. When a young man of that district has been bitten by the serpent of love, what does he do? He goes to Sylvanus, and has the name of the lady, garnished with a heart or a floral cupid, engraved on his hands, arms, or chest. His "studio" is a tiny shop, with a gaudy chintz curtain for door, the window decorated with prints of the tattooed bodies of his clients. Elsewhere about the exterior are coloured designs of Chinese dragons, floral emblems, cupids, anchors, flags, and other devices with which your skin may be beautified at trifling cost--anything from sixpence to five shillings.

The professor works every evening from seven to ten o'clock, in his shirt-sleeves. In the corner of the studio is the operating-table, littered with small basins of liquid inks of various hues, and a sterilizing-vessel, which receives the electric needle after each client has been punctured. Winter, he tells me, contradicting the poet, is his best time. He finds that in Shadwell and the neighbourhood the young man's fancy turns more definitely to love in the dark evenings than in the spring. As soon as October sets in his studio is crowded with boys who desire the imprinting of beautiful names on their thick skins. He calculates that he must have tattooed the legend "Mizpah" some eight thousand times since he started in the business. Girls, too, sometimes visit him, and demonstrate their love for their boy in a chosen masculine way.

To-night he had snatched a few hours in the West, and was just returning home. It being then well past twelve, we sauntered a little way with him, and called at a coffee-stall for a cup of the leathery tea which is the speciality of the London coffee-stall. Most stalls have their "regulars," especially those that are so fortunate as to pitch near a Works of any kind. The stall we visited was on the outskirts of Soho, and near a large colour-printing house which was then working day and night. I wonder, by the way, why printers always drink tea and stout in preference to other beverages. I wonder, too, why policemen prefer hard-boiled eggs above all other food.

It is a curious crowd that gathers about the stalls. In the course of a night you may meet there every type of Londoner. You may meet policemen, chauffeurs, printers, toughs, the boy and girl who have been to a gallery and want to finish the night in proper style, and--the cadgers. At about the middle of the night there is a curious break in the company: the tone changes. Up to four o'clock it's the stay-up-all-nights; after that hour it's the get-up-earlys. One minute there would be a would-be viveur, in sleek dress clothes; then along comes a cadger; then along comes a warrior from the battlefield. Then, with drowsy clatter, up comes a gang of roadmen, scavengers, railway workers, and so on. A little later comes the cheerful one who has made a night of it, and, somehow, managed to elude the police. He takes a cup of strong tea, demonstrates the graceful dancing of Mr. Malcolm Scott, and smashes two cups in doing it. Then up comes the sport, with a cert. for the big race to-day. Then up comes six o'clock, and the keeper packs up, and shoves his stall to its yard.

After a long exchange of reminiscences, we parted with the tattoo artist, and I walked home with Georgie, the outmoded, who lives in Vauxhall Bridge Road. I have often told him that the stiff, crinoline atmosphere of the place is the right touch for him, but he does not understand. It is a poor faded thing, this district; not glamorously old; just ridiculously out of fashion. Shops and houses are all echoes of the terrible seventies, and you seem to hear the painful wheezing of a barrel-organ, to catch a glimpse of side-whiskers and bustles, and to be encompassed by all the little shamefaced emotions of that period which died so long ago and only haunt us now in this street and in the provinces.

There, on the steps of one of the silly little houses, I parted from Georgie and this book.