Skin Deep – September 2019

SKIN DEEP MAGAZINE • 45

TaLeS FrOm

ThE CiTy

Deep in the heart of London, in what’s left of Soho, lies Diamond Jacks

• a studio that if you were looking at your phone while going past it, you
  could be forgiven thinking wasn’t there. In the big scheme of studios
  in the UK it’s a perfect anomaly, for its soul lies in a time gone by...

I

can’t decide what kind of a story this is meant

to be. Is it the story of how Dennis Cockell

founded a great studio in the heart of the

seediest streets of London or is it the story of

how my buddy Darryl Gates came to be part of it? Is

it a little chunk of my own story simply from being

old enough to have walked these streets a million

times in search of slabs that were supposed to be

gold or is it a simple love story about Soho itself?

With the benefit of hindsight, I think it’s a story

about all of these things and that’s an important

thing to bear in mind as we speed along because

none of it is ‘on purpose’... the place itself is the

reason the three of us sit looking down on a vastly

different variety of pedestrians than we would have

been seeing back in 1983....

Dennis Cockell has one of those auras about him

that says he’s seen it all. There’s nothing I can throw

at him that will phase him—not that I’m about to.

In 50 years of tattooing, he must have been asked

for every type of tattoo you can think of... but back

in the mid-eighties, Dennis also did a few things

around the place that set fireworks off in my head.

He tattooed Zodiac Mindwarp.

He’s also tattooed Brian Setzer and Pete Burns.

He’s tattooed members of The Damned, The Cult,

Killing Joke, Sex Pistols, Nick Cave... (this is a long

and impressive list) and when you’re The Man who

tattooed the people that go to make up the very fab-

ric of who you grew up to be, that makes you Very

Important Indeed. Thus, unbeknownst to me, Den-

nis Cockell was the very reason I got my first tattoo

back in 1987—seeing Zodiac Mindwarp out on the

fringes, acting like he owned the universe with his

comic book head and more than a fine line in pat-

ter... well, what’s not to love, but maybe you had to

be there.

Let’s set the tape machine rolling:

“I’ve been tattooing for fifty years now—started

in 1969. My shop prior to this one was on Finchley

Road. It was the usual story—we had to move out be-

cause they built a new shopping centre. There was

nothing else available in that area and I found this

place (what has become Diamond Jacks in Walkers

Court, though Dennis tattooed under his own name

here) in the Evening Standard. It was never a tattoo

shop before that, they did some film editing here

but nothing else. It was a good deal but at the time,

there were no tattoo shops around here and that’s

what sold it to me.”

We’re in the early eighties at this point... if you’re

old enough, you’ll recall that if there was even one Wo

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Dennis tattooing^ Steve^ Jones^ of^ the^ Sex^ Pistols