Under the skin. On the skin. For millennia men and women have brought onto their skin that which lies beneath it. To uncover more of the secrets that lie in the Russian heart and soul, I decided to meet an artist who drew out the inner visions and loyalties.
‘Tattoos can tell the history of a life,’ said Pavel Angel, the country’s most celebrated tattooist. ‘Memories, turning points and rites of passage are marked on the body with a point of pain.’
I’d travelled from the bright light of late summer Crimea back to Moscow, drawn to Angel’s dark basement parlour by Dmitri Denisovich’s howling wolf tattoo. ‘In old days if tattooist did bad job, his fingers were broken one by one,’ my chicken tsar had told me a few weeks earlier. ‘Is lucky for Pavel Angel that he did mine perfect.’
Angel was born in Voronezh, an industrial city some 300 miles south of Moscow. His father had been a building engineer. His mother was an art teacher who taught him ‘to see beauty, to distinguish the bright side of the world from the dark’.
She also taught him to draw.
‘I started to cut myself so as to remember the important points in my life,’ he told me when we met. Dark tattoos emerged from the neck and cuffs of his black T-shirt, marked his oesophagus, ran along his arms and vanished down his backside. He was fit and muscular with a large, close-cropped head and mutton-chop sideburns. Yet beneath the forbidding exterior his cornflower-blue eyes hinted at a good-humoured kindness.
‘I cut myself to show others who I once was, and who I am now. Here I recorded my leaving home with my first tattoo,’ he said, stroking the bold, full sleeve pattern on his forearm ‘… with a Nazi eagle and the letters LAH. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.’
In the last months of the Soviet empire, Angel had been conscripted into the Red Army, one of the million soldiers who kept Central Europe under Moscow’s thumb. At the end of the Cold War, and before their repatriation, these Russians had almost nothing to do. Angel filled his time with drawing, and his skill attracted the attention of fellow recruits who asked him to tattoo them.
‘I did small designs with a simple needle: unit number, blood type, a bat for guys in intelligence, a lightning bolt for communications units.’
In Soviet times tattoos were found only on soldiers and criminals. As a conscript, Angel had chosen to mark himself with Nazi iconography to demonstrate his disdain for communism. ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ had been the Führer’s personal bodyguard, its soldiers executing thousands of Russians during the Second World War.
Criminals also chose Nazi death heads and bloody Soviet medals to denote disdain, rank or – if imprisoned – to set themselves apart from political prisoners. Stars on the shoulders or knees meant ‘I kneel to no man’. Onion-domed churches acted as a talisman, the number of cupolas indicating the number of crimes or convictions. Some camp inmates even had Lenin or Stalin cut into their chests, in the belief that no firing squad would shoot the venerated portraits.
Female convicts tended to be marked with magic numbers, the thieves’ cross or an erect penis and knife with the words, ‘Betray me and I’ll cut off your balls’. A bracelet signified a five-year sentence. Manacles indicated a decade in a gulag. Bleeding dots boasted of survival ‘between four walls’ in solitary confinement. A spider showed that the prisoner would walk for ever along a criminal path. Camp tattooists – known as kol’shchiki or prickers – were respected for their deft handling of handmade ‘bee sting’ shilo needles.
After the army Angel returned to Voronezh, tattooing friends in exchange for ‘respect and a bottle of vodka’. But ‘local bandits’ made life dangerous – as they did all over the country – so he made tracks for the capital. He served his apprenticeship at an Italian-owned studio and then opened his own parlour near the Dinamo metro station.
‘In Moscow I caught the wave of self-expression,’ he said, lighting an unfiltered cigarette. A manikin wearing an Apache crest of used needles sat beside us at the table. Behind it, glass display cases were filled with miniature skulls, three-headed plastic dogs and Xenomorph, the extraterrestrial chest-buster from Alien. ‘Democracy brought us the chance to show our true attitudes, to show what we felt. But as tattooing has become mainstream, it’s lost its foundation. In the past a tattoo denoted rank and experience. It had to be earned. Today you buy it like patriotism. Both are for sale.’
At least half of Angel’s time was spent reworking – or disguising – old tattoos. Politicians and businessmen like Dmitri came to him with crude spiders or crucified nudes, saying, ‘Now I drive a Bentley and wear a gold Rolex but I still have this shit on my shoulder. If the minister invites me to the sauna, I’ll look like a fool.’ Angel subsumed the past into a new design, as he did with his own first swastika.
‘In the boardroom and in the Duma, a man has to behave in a certain civilised way. But under his suit, he isn’t all buttoned up. He is someone else, something wilder. He is filled with passion and fury and desire. I talk to my clients about this duality. I try to find what is inside them.’
I thought of Dmitri of course, and the wildness – or at least ritzy rebellion – that seemed to beat under his skin. I wondered aloud about the split between inner truth and that which is drawn across the surface. The choices of Angel’s powerful clients fascinated me, and I asked if they tended to be tattooed with personal or traditional patriotic symbols: the Romanov coat of arms, Russian wolves or bears, the hammer and sickle rising over the Reichstag.
Angel pushed back a flop of blond hair and said ‘Most just want something “beautiful”.’ His enthusiasm deflated like a balloon. ‘They change the old message for decoration without a message,’ he replied in a flat voice.
‘Dollar signs?’ I asked with an eyebrow raised.
‘The tattoo business is now like paid sex,’ he replied with cynicism.
In Britain I know a film director who climbs mountains. He had the route of his greatest climb – Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes – tattooed up his right leg with base camp, bivouac stops and altitudes marked on his skin. Footballer David Beckham’s forty tattoos are said to remind him of ‘the important people’ in his life, as well as of motivational maxims rendered in Chinese and Hindi script. On his upper left arm, Canada’s Justin Trudeau sports the planet Earth inside a Haida raven. Yet most modern tattoos tend to be no more than fashion accessories.
‘When your body is marked, it is for life, not for a single day. It sends a message,’ volunteered Angel. ‘But many younger people come in and want a tattoo in five minutes. They don’t have memories. They haven’t even lived yet. They say that they want a tattoo to show their love, but for whom? For a woman? A child? Life? God? I work with them. I try to enhance their vision. I don’t impose my ideas on them. Often I send them away because they believe that a tattoo will change them.’ He snuffed out the cigarette and continued: ‘In Russian we say “Chelovek cheloveku volk”. A man is a wolf to another man. Every time Russia faces a crisis people want wolf tattoos, because life is hard and they feel under attack. I tell them to come back when times are better.’
Homo homini lupus est.
‘If the economy – or the world – continues to collapse then we may return to more genuine traditions, and tattoos will come to be earned again.’