City of needles: a walking tour of London tattoo shops

Walk any long street in London and you will pass the ghost of a tattoo shop: a boarded door, a faded sign, a basement window with a light that has been on since 1982. The survivors tell the city’s story better than the landmarks. In Camden, a shop that opened in the punk years still runs on walk-ins and word of mouth. In Peckham, a former chapel now hosts one chair and a queue that forms before opening. In Soho, the oldest continuous shop in the city keeps its flash on the wall exactly where it has hung for decades. “Every shop on this street is a decade of someone’s life,” says the owner of the basement shop, who has tattooed three generations of the same families. Tattoo shops do not move. They outlast the fashions around them, which makes them the most honest map of the city there is.