Come Here To Me!

This week, my ‘Hidden Histories’ slot on Newstalk Breakfast looked at the history of the Irish and tattoos. The last item on the show, time was tight but we covered quite a bit and I thought the slot worth sharing here. It was a chance to draw attention to the great research of Damian Shiels on the Irish in the American Civil War,  and I particularly enjoyed digging into the archives to look at some of the coverage of Dublin’s first professional tattooist,  Johnny Eagle, from Irish newspapers in decades long past.

John Larkin (1929-2015) was better known to generations of Dubliners as as Johnny Eagle. Born at the tail end of the 1920s, he opened his first studio at Frenchman’s Lane near Busaras, though in the years that followed he moved around the city (indeed, the name can still be seen at the top of Capel Street). When Michael Vincy of The Irish Times interviewed him in 1962, he wrote that “there are some 200 tattooists in Britain,one in Ulster, and Johnny as far as he knows has the Republic to himself.”  His obituary in the same newspaper last year noted that Larkin’s neighbours once believed he drove a van for a living. Certainly, Dublin today is a more inked city than in the early days of Johnny Eagle.

1962 feature on visiting Johnny Eagle’s tattoo shop.