I used to think that the most pointlessly grotesque thing you could do to your body, aside from having a piercing down below, was to get a tattoo. What are tattoos, I’d whine, but an attention-seeking act of self-harm which screams, “Hey, look how non-conformist I am!” But I was wrong. It’s worse than that: they are an attention-seeking act of self-harm endorsed by Fearne Cotton.

The debate has been rumbling for a while as to whether tattoos are now so mainstream that they are naff. I think we now have our answer. In the August issue of Glamour, Fearne breathlessly reveals that she is “addicted to tattoos” and has “more than 11” (I guess that means 12). “Seriously, if I wasn’t on TV, I’d have tattoos all over my body,” she says. “I love the look, the process, the feeling of, ‘Yes! I didn’t pass out, I’ve just achieved something.’

I got a new one in LA. It covers most of my back at the bottom and it’s a Fifties pin-up mermaid – lovely boobs, beautiful.”

Since Fearne looks like the sort of girl who still has a furry pencil case and pink teddies at the bottom of her bed, I think we can agree that tattoos have officially lost their “underground” status. It is like finding out that your crack dealer is Tinkerbell.

Tattoos of the rich and famous

Get a tattoo, join the club. Once the mark of street gangs, they now grace the bodies of practically every celeb you know

BACKGROUND

• Why women get sick of their tattoos

• NHS blows millions on removing tattoos

Now that you can get tattooed for as little as £25 and tattoo parlour chains are springing up in shopping malls, it’s about as subversive as wearing cargo pants. Any time now OAPs will start getting a barbed wire armband at Asda when they pop in for a tin of corned beef.

But still they fascinate. Vogue this month dedicates several pages to how tattoos have completely lost their taboo now that one in four US adults has one. Helen Mirren has been done, Sam Cam has a dolphin on her ankle and Gwyneth Paltrow, in possibly not her most imaginative moment, went into Selfridges to have her right thigh decorated with the letter C. Hell, it is even perfectly acceptable to go up to a woman and say, “Nice tats, love.”

Yet it’s perverse that tattoos ever achieved anarchic status at all. As the author Ralph Keyes says, getting tattooed is a profoundly conservative act declaring: “I am so sure I will always be who I am today that I’m going to decorate my body with indelible ink.” It is like never being able to remove the Bay City Rollers scarf that you wore in 1977 aged 11 even when you are 63 and bald.

Pretty soon Saga cruises will be populated by a tattooed army of silver surfers. Body art will accrue the same status as a blue rinse. And who will be the cool, non-conformists then? Ha. Those of us with bodies free of any blemish except liver spots and varicose veins.

Yes, fellow clean-skins, our time is coming. Never say that squares don’t win.

bargainhunter@thetimes.co.uk

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