YOO HOO! DO YOU TATTOO?

SKIN, AND WHAT LIES BENEATH.

           Summer, as well as bringing the jasmine into flower on our terrace, has encouraged people in the street to unbutton and undress. The result has been a sudden and alarming revelation of how widespread has become the practice of tattooing. Forget the occasional discreet star on the shoulder or swallow circling the ankle. Every second pedestrian has become an ambulant art gallery with red, blue and violet ink rioting over each centimetre of exposed skin.

           Tattoos used to fascinate me. Particularly their iconography, as varied as it was gaudy: a ship's name, surrounded by ropes and anchors; cartoon characters, those of Disney and Chuck Jones predominating; awkward forties-style pin-ups and the mawkish flower-wreathed mottos - "The Sweetest Girl I Ever Kissed Was Another Man's Wife - My Mother." Most tattoos offered persuasive evidence for the explanation often offered for getting them - that one was drunk.

           Then there was Japanese horimono ­- those cornucopii of dragons and chrysanthemums and battling samurai spilling over every patch of skin. On my first visit to Japan, I tried not to gawk at casually exposed arms or legs, gaudily and colourfully decorated as the pages of a comic book.

           My first crime novel, Bondi Blues, written while a producer at ABC radio in Sydney, had a tattooing theme. Telling myself it was research, I took to hanging out with tattooist Tony Cohen in his parlour opposite my office, on the edge of the city's tenderloin, Kings Cross. He called his establishment The Illustrated Man, after Ray Bradbury's story of a  man whose tattoos, allegedly created by a time-traveling woman, can be read as stories.

           I never got tattooed myself - wasn't even tempted. On a couple of occasions, however, I did indulge in the custom of "buying a tattoo" for a girlfriend - one of those gifts which, like sexy lingerie, more benefits the giver than the receiver.

           Watching one of these being applied, lulled by the heat of the room and the buzz of the needle, inspired me to make A Cannibal Art, a documentary about the creativity and craft of the tattoo. A song from  Philip Glass's Liquid Days provided the obbligato; the one whose lyrics read "Gradually we became aware/Of a hum in the room./An electrical hum....."

           Compiling the documentary launched me into the bizarre world of skin art, culminating in an interview with a former sailor who claimed to be the most tattooed man in Australia. The guided tour of his epidermis drew the line at revealing what lurked in his underwear. He did, however, describe what the baggy briefs concealed. "There's Tweety Pie," he said, "and Sylvester, and on the knob, I've got a fish..."  He leered. "That's for Catholic girls, who can't eat meat on Fridays."

           Let me leave you with one of the treasures of the tattoo tradition - created in the same year, and by the same team of Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, as 1939's Academy Award winner Over the Rainbow. Any resemblance between the two tunes, like that between tattooing and the conventional world, is, however, purely coincidental.