At the café where Georgie and I were lounging, the band was kept hard at work by these Requests. They were "La Bohème" selection, "That Midnight Choo-choo," "Tipperary," "Tales of Hoffman" Barcarolle, "All Aboard for Dixie," "In my Harem," and "The Ragtime Navvy." At the first bars of the Navvy we drifted out, and fell into the arms of The Tattoo Artist, who was taking an evening off.
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.