Beauty of tattoos is more than skin deep

Date Published: {J}

On first sight, Joey Ostner doesn’t exactly look like a walking advertisement for his profession. He sports a few tattoos admittedly and has several piercings on his body, but it’s all pretty low key. His forearms are pretty bare, which isn’t what you might expect from a tattoo artist.

But appearances are deceptive – over the past five years, Joey has tattooed 40 per cent of his body and has big plans for the rest. But not the face, says Joey who works in Irish Ink on William Street West alongside fellow tattoo artist, French man John Darricau

As Joey rolls up the leg of his jeans and pulls up his tee shirt, body art is visible everywhere. His left shin has a spectacular purple depiction of the Grim Reaper, complete with an hourglass, to mark the passing of time, while there is a finely-crafted skull on the front of his foot. The Grim Reaper is based on the Terry Prachett original, he explains, and the skull is just one of several adorning his body.

To the casual eye, it might all seem a bit macabre but Joey says he isn’t obsessed with death, just very aware of it.

“Death always walks with you and will walk faster than you eventually.”

Skulls symbolise death in our culture, but in other countries, they also mean life, he says.

Anyone livelier than Joey would be difficult to find. He is passionate about his work, gets annoyed when people judge him on the basis of his appearance, and is searingly honest – and very funny – about the influence of celebrities on the tattooing habits of teenage girls.

Joey, a qualified carpenter, moved to Galway from his home just outside Munich five and a half years ago. After arriving he stayed in a hostel where he met an American girl who was covered from head to toe in tattoos.

He got a flyer for Irish Ink tattoo parlour and, as it happened, when he moved into an apartment, their shop was around the corner.

“So I walked in and got my first tattoo done,” he says.

Joey had wanted body arts since he was a child and he was hooked.

“I was always a bit of a scruffy boy. My brother and I are the only tattooed people in my family.”

When Joey started getting tattoos, his father told him that he looked “like a sailor or a criminal”. But his son didn’t care.

And it was a foolish person who approached him in a night club in Galway one night and told him he looked disgusting. It rarely happens, he says, and practically everybody under 40 regards tattoos as cool.

Joey remembers admiring his older brother’s tattoos when he was a kid and ignored his advice to stay away from them.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.