Butterfly or dolphin? Anchor or Celtic symbol? None of those, thanks, says Andy Capper in Red Bull Music Academy's  Daily Note. The best tattoos should be original and weird.

It used to be only the skins, punks, Teds or rockers who had tattoos. These days, every single dimwit in a crap band has one. And it’s not just indie rockers trying to look hard. Boyband members have the obligatory tasteful Celtic cross next to a Chinese symbol that means “honour”. Girlband members from Newcastle have tribal hand tattoos that draw attention away from the fact that their music sounds like the Nolan Sisters. The racist John Mayer (google “John Mayer Playboy”) has one of those perfect Japanese cherry blossom coy carp sleeves that he’s had done to make himself look “edgy”, when it just looks like he bought one of those fake tattoo sleeves that mid-30s lesbians wear to Gay Pride marches. I think that the more tasteful or perfect the tattoo, the worse it looks. Tattoos should be rugged and weird and bold. Here’s a list of my Five Rock’n’Roll Tattoo Heroes to illustrate the point.

GG ALLIN
GG had tattoos that make the ones in those brutal Russian prison tattoo compendium books look like delicate peacocks on the left shoulder blade of a princess. Seemingly carved by a rusty knife dipped in black diarrhoea, they range from the “Vomitose” skull with a condom on its head on his right pectoral to the penis hand “Fuck You” on the left arm. Just below is a half-formed lizard which seems to be averting its gaze from the tombstone with “Live Fast/Die” scrawled next to his initials: note there is no “young” in the epithet.

TUPAC
Apart from Eminem, Tupac is the most overrated rapper of all time, but he was really good-looking and had great tattoos. He understood that the best ones aren’t meant to be pretty or tasteful. Rather, they’re meant to make people see them and think, “Wow, that person is badass/a bit crazy/does not give a fuck.” His best ones are the “Heartless” skull and crossbones, the huge “Thug Life” stomach piece, and the machine gun with “50 Niggaz” on top of it — a “shout out” to his niggaz in all 50 states of America. “Nigga” in this case standing for “Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished”.

HENRY ROLLINS
It’s not cool to like this guy any more, but as a pale, sickly young boy aged 15, he was one of my idols. He inspired me to get my first ever tattoo, a homemade stick-and-poke in my kneecap of the logo of a skateboard company that left me with damaged nerves in my leg and no skateboard company logo after all the ink ran out. Henry had the hooded cowl Misfits skull, two sets of Black Flag bars, the Einstürzende Neubauten guy, the crazy Stooges-inspired “Search & Destroy” back piece, but best of all, I thought, was the Charles Manson “Creepy Crawl” spider on his chest.

ANDREW WEATHERALL
Andrew got his latest done at Frith Street Tattoo in Soho, which, in my humble opinion, is London’s best tattoo parlour. The Western-style forearm tattoos mixed with his “gent from olde times” dress sense make him one of London’s most stylish people. Some of his earlier tattoos are of symbols from the Temple ov Psychick Youth. His most recent were done by resident artists Stewart Robson and Valerie Vargas. Guest artists at Frith Street include people such as Chad Koeplinger, Frank Carter from Gallows and Thomas Hooper sometimes works out of there too.

LIL WAYNE
I cannot wait to see the tattoos he gets in prison because the ones he’s got now look like he’s already serving life on death row for the murder of an entire church. Sometime in the mid-2000s, rappers from the South really started piling on the tattoos, and Lil Wayne and his mentor Birdman were the leading freaks of the scene. The tattoos were of guns, gang logos, dead brethren, angels and demons, all crossing over each other and blending into one gigantic, exploding eye-fuck that just screams, “I have taken way, way too many drugs, please don’t ever take me home to meet your mother.” Honourable mention here goes to Atlanta’s Gucci Mane, who doesn’t have quite as many tattoos as Lil Wayne but makes up for it by appearing even more retarded and having a chain piece of Bart Simpson on a skateboard made out of yellow, white and blue diamonds. It is ten inches high.

Illustration: Romain Faure