The Art of Tattoo, and After
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Imagine an extraordinary body of work by a dedicated tattooist, essentially an artist, a man who became, through illness, unable to use a tattoo marker, and turned to something completely different. At the notable, externally-decorated Ruby’s Rooms on the seafront, you can see this unique collection of work.
Xed (pronounced Zed) Le Head was for many years revered as an innovator and expert in the world of tattooing. “A tattoo God. A Legend” wrote Touka Voodoo of the Stockholm Alternative, a Bespoke and Holistic tattoo parlour. Xed’s tattoo work was internationally famous, exhibited in venues as far as Eastern Europe and Japan. He loved it and dedicated his life to it.
XED in his second phase
Soon after he met his wife Wiggy, disease began to disintegrate his spine and he was confined to a wheelchair, with only limited use of his arms. However, Wiggy became his carer and amanuensis. She prepared his canvases and his paint and his tools and he developed a way of working by squeezing paint out through an icing tube, on to computerised designs on canvas or board. He worked incessantly – the paint is thickly layered and the resulting works highly textured – and as he finished one outline in these mandala-type creations, they set it to dry and he began another, going back to the previous one when the layer was dry, and so on and so on, having six or seven in progress each day. The result is this unique collection, which must be seen to be appreciated. The photographs don’t do justice to their detail or their viscerality.
The domestic space at Ruby’s Rooms, run as an arthouse-led bed-and-breakfast, is two doors away from where Xed lived and worked, and he and the owners were friends. The show is therefore more than simply an objective demonstration of work; it’s a tribute to him, his work, his life and his friendship.
While many human beings carry his art around on their bodies wherever they go, this particular body, of artwork, is left to posterity. I have to confess that I’ve never understood the reason for tattooing. Self-adornment, I can appreciate. But the idea of a permanent blue picture on your pristine, precious, vulnerable skin, for ever and ever – not for me. I’d want to wash the pictures off after a while and replace them with new ones, and, like the sand designs of the Holi festival or the sand Mandalas of Tibetan Buddhists, their impermanence and their mutability would be part of their statement. But Wiggy patiently began to explain to me what her tattoos meant. “They’re a record of my life that I carry with me”, she said. “Each one is significant. Each one contains a story, an episode.” And I begin to understand, just a little. If Art is about Life, if Art in general is a permanent and significant chronicle of social and historical events, then the unique personal adornment of tattoos is exactly that, but for one individual.
Xed at the height of tattoo fame
Xed Le Head and Wiggy met because initially she went in to be adorned by him. Their joint creative journey has been unique, piquant, and ultimately uplifting even after Xed’s death. On her face is inked a symbol which, she tells me, is a special Tibetan design. She says that since she has had it on her cheeks many people have been attracted to talk to her; that the symbol has been for her a means of communication and connection. Xed taught her everything about its meaning and significance to the Buddhist religion. He also taught her how to tattoo herself. Each of her self-tattoos therefore make her, her art, her persona, her self, into a one-ness. For her, the blue marks are an extension of spiritual awareness. The thing she can’t understand, she says, is when someone walks into a tattoo shop and says he wants that picture on his arm or his forehead (or buttocks or left ear, or whatever piece of his body happens to be available).
This exhibition was a learning experience for me. What happened to Xed Le Head was unfair; what he has left behind is, like his body art, a permanent, life-affirming memory. Perry Rule, editor of Total Tattoo magazine, recently wrote:
“He was a visionary, an innovator, and an influencer in the truest sense of the word – but more than that, he was a friend. And there are many, many other people who will say that too. We will all miss him. Fly high, fly free Xed.”
A Tribe Called Xed is showing at Ruby’s Rooms, 54 Eversfield Place, TN37 6DB. Total Tattoo website at totaltattoo.co.uk Contact for details for this and future exhibitions and for rooms, Kate Jaggers at [email protected], or Rubysrooms.com
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