Because it’s there,” said George Mallory when asked why he wanted to climb Everest. It’s a good reason also for the desire to tattoo. After all, when you’re a fabulous starlet who has adorned herself with everything from Manolos to maquillage, skin is still “there”. It is a tantalising blank canvas, and where tattoos were once the mark of street gangs and ne’er-do- wells, they are now the height of glamour.

The current issue of Vogue has a piece celebrating them, one in two Americans reportedly has them, and one in five Brits. On the celebrity front, well, you name it: Sienna Miller completes her luxe-layabout look with a cluster of stars on her silken shoulder; Peaches Geldof has a bow on her neck, in keeping with her tantrum-in-the-nursery style; Kate Moss has two swallows diving into her buttock crack; even Samantha Cameron has a dolphin on her ankle.

There is a next step for celebrities who have immersed themselves completely in their own, sometimes bonkers, world. They use tattoos as an extension not just of their style but of their ethos. So the body becomes a beacon of their beliefs. Football fans have long embraced this, but they now have elegant company. Angelina Jolie, sometime UN goodwill ambassador, has “know your rights” tattooed below the nape of her neck. Miller also has a bluebird, the subject both of a poem she loves by Charles Bukowski — the drunken author who put the beat into deadbeat — and a drawing by Edie Sedgwick, whom she played in Factory Girl.

And take Amy Winehouse, whose slender body is covered in 1950s pin-up-style girls and provocative slogans. This is an extension of her love of women and interest in female sexuality, according to her tattoo artist, Henry Hate. “She’s very interested in women’s sexuality, in that va-va-voom,” he says. She takes her inspiration, he adds, from the likes of Bettie Page, and uses her body as an extension of her music, which is very aware of women and of sex. Hate also tattoos Pete Doherty, and says that a similar desire to convey his ethos dictates his choices. “Pete likes that controlled chaos thing,” says Hate, “and when he had Astile, his son’s name, he wanted it to look as if he had just drawn it.”

Amy and Pete are both utterly lovely and very courteous, he says. After one of Amy’s sessions, she asked if she might walk his dog, Jolene. A couple of weeks later, she stopped by, bearing a dog toy. “Both Amy and Pete are hopeless romantics,” says Hate. “In a very literal way, they wanted to wear their hearts on their sleeves.”

As Amy’s pin-up girls show, the body is crucially significant in iconography. Tattooing your body means that you incorporate your chosen symbol into that iconography — and give your body a totemic power of your own choosing. Christina Aguilera and Posh both have the Hebrew phrase “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” inked into their skin.

This power is not limited to celebrities. Many women who have had mastectomies have their mutilated chests tattooed. It is a way to reclaim their bodies by controlling one aspect of their appearance, and it allays a sense of helplessness after seeing themselves change beyond recognition. The same feeling that the body is permanent and that anything one inks onto it is powerful also leads people to commemorate loved ones on their skin. Step forward again, Ms Winehouse. Hate reveals that her fondness for voluptuous sirens and for homage to her family is combined in one tattoo. “That girl on her arm?” he says. “That’s her nan. She was beautiful.”

Looking at the tattoos and the tattooed, I feel an oddly persuasive urge to get inked. It’s not just the fact that stylish people have them — the likes of Miller can wear her pants over her tights and still look good, so it’s no surprise that she makes tats look nice. More seductive is the idea that if you love style, accessories and ornamentation, tattooing is a fundamental way of doing it. If I get a tattoo, then, wherever I am — in my swimsuit, on the operating table, even in a nursing home — I will still have this one, pretty ornament, chosen by me, an augmentation of what nature gave me. And tattoos today can be elegant and elaborate: technological advances mean they can be far more cleanly drawn and intricate than the smudgy designs of the past.

They say you should think twice before you get a tattoo. Re12t, they intone, that you will have it for ever. But, in fact, you won’t have it for ever, you will have it until you die. Since we have bodies only for a finite time, I see no good argument against decorating them. As Fearne Cotton said so elegantly recently, “People say, ‘What about when you get old?’ I don’t care. I just won’t show ’em. I won’t have my back out when I’m 90, going, ‘Ooh, look at me mermaid, all saggy on me arse.’ You only live once!”

Lately, I rediscovered an Arthur Rackham illustration of cherry blossom. The next time I noticed what I was absent-mindedly doing, I had drawn it on the inside of my wrist. I suspect it would take very little encouragement for me to get in the queue behind Amy and make an urgent appointment for some super-sharp needle action.

Henry Hate is at Prick tattoos and piercing, 386 Old Street, EC1; henryhate.com

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