The man with the floral tattoos

GEOFF OSTLING IS often asked to name his favourite flower. The plants he likes best are big, fleshy flowers such as the hippeastrum, or showy, exuberant plants that pop with colour.

As Geoff opens the front door of his Petersham home and guides me down the hallway, his floral fascination seems infused in every inch of space. There’s the glass cabinet in the corner, proudly filled with floral patterned china. The walls are lined with paintings of Sydney’s native plants, and dried leaves salvaged from the Peace Park in Hiroshima. In the living room, even the armchairs are furnished in floral upholstery.

But Geoff’s fascination with flowers doesn’t end there.

The 66- year-old retired history teacher is covered head to toe with tattoos, a colourful bodysuit depicting the flowers of a Sydney garden. Geoff got his first tattoo at the age of 42, and within a year, extended the design with a series of orchids. He is perhaps best known for pledging his tattooed skin to the National Gallery of Australia.

“I had always been interested in tattoos,” Geoff says, settling into his floral armchair. “Then I met this wonderful man called Mervyn Chapman, sadly now dead. He was a director of a company and an accountant, and had a body suit that allowed him to wear an open neck shirt. Nobody knew he had tattoos.”

I cast my gaze across Geoff’s black and white checked shirt. He wears the modest attire of a teacher: long sleeves and a buttoned up collar. Yet as Geoff gestures in mid speech, the vibrant flowers inked across his hands peek out from beneath his sleeves.

“Your hands are quite impressive,” I say to Geoff.

He smiles and leans forward in his chair. “Now these hands are fairly new. For years, people have asked me, ‘When are you getting your hands tattooed, when are you getting your hands tattooed?’ I thought about it long and hard, and when I turned 65 last year, I decided that it was time. But what exactly to get tattooed – that was the problem.”

The history behind the tattoos on Geoff’s hands can be traced back to his Swedish great-great-grandfather – a lighthouse keeper for 34 years. Geoff commemorated his ancestor with a lighthouse, immortalised in ink on his right wrist. This was matched on the other wrist with a tattoo of Sydney’s red and white Hornby light.

“My mother’s favourite flower was a Queen Elizabeth rose, so I had it tattooed on this side,” Geoff explains, waving his left hand. “And dad’s favourite flower was – and I don’t want to be sentimental about this – but it was a waratah. And so I got a waratah on this side, and a rose on the other.”

GEOFF CLASPS HIS hands in his lap, sits back and steers the conversation to the history books. There are some extraordinary historical figures with tattoos across their arms and hands, he tells me.

“Winston Churchill’s mother for example had – well I’ve never seen it of course – but people describe the most beautiful little serpent that twined around her wrist and curled up her arm.

“But the interesting thing was that she wore a large bracelet that covered the tattoo up completely, so people couldn’t see it. It was the last thing she’d take off when she took a new lover. She’d take off the bracelet and they’d go wild with passion – uncontrollable passion – and therefore, great sex.”

Many historical dignitaries have sported tattoos, Geoff explains. In 1862, the Prince of Wales, who became King Edward VII, had a cross tattooed on his arm to mark his pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

“When you have the highest in the land with tattoos, it soon caught on, not only for men, but for women as well.”

Nicholas II, the assassinated Tsar of Russia, was heavily tattooed. The Tsar’s cousin, the Emperor of Germany was also tattooed, as was King Frederick IX of Denmark.

A recent English royal with a penchant for tattoos was Princess Margaret, who reportedly “had a tattoo on her bum cheek”. And then there’s the Crown Prince of Denmark, who marks his service as a navy seal with a tattoo on his leg.

GEOFF’S OWN TATTOOS seem to occupy a space between history and art. They were designed by Canberra artist and tattooist eX de Medici, who has 18 artworks displayed in the National Gallery of Australia. I ask him to talk me through the design of his floral body suit.

Geoff begins to unbutton his shirt. “The problem with tattoos is that you’ve got to take your clothes off to look at them,” he laughs. “This is embarrassing, even at this stage of my life!”

As he peels his shirt off, a burst of colour – vivid reds, yellows, blues and greens leap off his chest. His flowers gloriously overlap and intertwine – waratahs, wattle, bottlebrush and banksias. When Geoff spins around, I catch a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House emblazoned on his back.

Geoff’s body suit was inspired by ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’ the sprawling 600-year-old triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch. “In Bosch’s painting there’s people wandering around and having sex with each other. In my tattoos, we don’t have the sex, but flowers are the sex organs of the plant.

“If I had penises and clitorises all over me I’d look like a shower curtain. I don’t think that would be a very good idea, somehow. But I can do that with flowers, and there’s no problem!”

I ask Geoff if he has any tattoos outside of the Sydney garden theme. Well, he says, there’s the Thai tattooing, the image of Ganesh, and of course, the teddy bears.

“Somewhere there’s a bear with balloons,” he says.

Geoff pulls and tugs at his skin, searching for the elusive tattoo. “It’s here somewhere.”… Still searching… “Oh dear.” With my assistance, we finally find the teddy bear, a matching tattoo that Geoff and his partner Joe Chapman got to commemorate their ten-year anniversary.

As Geoff slips his shirt back on, he describes how tattoos are a way of documenting our personal history. Tattoos mark the happiness and heartbreak of our lives. They are symbols of love and affection for a partner, or celebrate a life-event such as a marriage, a birth or death.

For some men, “the first thing they do to celebrate their divorce from a relationship gone terribly wrong is to dash out and get a tattoo – a souvenir of that”.

“In a sense, the tattoos you’ve got on your body are the story of your life. Most people who don’t have a life don’t have any tattoos; it’s as simple as that.”

Does Geoff judge other people’s ink, or does he accept all tattoos as a valid form of expression?

“I think yes, we should accept it as all types of art,” he says. “Yet I still go to galleries and think, ‘Gosh, who on earth would buy this stuff!’ Picasso for many years had to put up with people saying, ‘my child or my monkey or my budgerigar could do better than that’. Of course they couldn’t. The Picassos live on, whereas the budgerigar dies and gets picked up and put in the garbage bin.”

IT COMES AS no surprise that Geoff is an avid art collector himself. “I would have loved to be a painter,” he says. “But boys didn’t do art when I went to school. We did physics and chemistry, woodworking, metalwork and boring things. In the old days if you were interested in history you became a history teacher and taught other people to be interested in history.”

Geoff taught in schools across Sydney for over 40 years. His particular interest in history shifts, depending on the book on his bedside table. “If I’m reading a book about George III, that’s what it becomes. Or through my reading I might become interested in Ned Kelly and whether he should have been hanged or not.”

Ned Kelly holds a prominent position not only in the history books, but immortalised in ink on the arms and chests of Australians today. Ned Kelly tribute tattoos can be seen as a symbol of rebellion or resilience. AFL player Ben Cousins has the outlaw’s last words, “SUCH IS LIFE” tattooed across his torso.

A study by Adelaide University Professor Roger Byard has revealed an intriguing link between males marked with Kelly tattoos.

Byard studied the cause of death of 20 South Australian men between the ages of 20 and 67 who had tattoos that referenced the infamous bushranger.

“Although the population studied is highly selected, individuals with these tattoos had an above average incidence of traumatic deaths,” Byard writes in a paper in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine.

In the small sample, people marked with Ned Kelly tattoos were nearly eight times more likely to have been murdered and nearly three more times likely to have killed themselves, compared to the general forensic autopsy population. Only three men had died from natural causes.

“Such is life,” indeed.

BACK IN GEOFF’S lounge room, the staircase above begins to creak. Geoff’s partner Joe attempts to unsuccessfully slink down the stairs.

Geoff: “Hello Joey!”

Joe lowers his head and avoids eye contact. He’d rather leave the interview and exhibitionism to Geoff.

Geoff: “Joey! Are you going to come down and join us? Are you ready to take your shirt off so we can have a look at your tattoos? Because we’re up to that bit.”

After a minute of coercion, Joe takes his shirt off and Geoff launches into another lecture.

Geoff: “Some of his bears are the same as mine. But mine sit on a waratah, whereas his sits on a lotus.”

Joe: “Is that enough?”

Geoff: “You can see a St Sebastian bear being shot with arrows, a Michelangelo bear, and the Archangel Gabriel from the Sistine Chapel.”

Geoff clasps Joe’s shoulders and twirls him around.

Geoff: “Okay, now round the back, he’s got good bears and evil bears. These are the four teddy bears of the Apocalypse. They’re on rocking horses – so they can’t do much damage.

Joey: “That’s enough, oh come on.”

Geoff: “And this is from a stained glass window that we saw in Rome.”

Joe: “No.”

Geoff: “No? Where was it?”

Joe: “In Mexico.”

Geoff: “In Mexico, oh righto. And this is the Ganesh down there, lying down and having a little snooze.”

Joe: “Now can I go? I’ve got to do the washing.”

Geoff: “You can go – but get some lunch for us please.”

HAVING SEEN GEOFF and Joe in a state of undress, I now feel comfortable enough to broach the subject of death. Geoff has braved hours of tattoo sessions, but how does he feel about being skinned from top to toe?

“Well, I’m not planning on doing it while I’m still alive!” he laughs. “When I was first approached about this, I was down in the National Gallery in Canberra and the curator came up to me and asked if I was prepared to leave the tattoos to the gallery. And I said, ‘Yeah, sure, of course I can’.”

The curator was startled by Geoff’s cavalier answer. “So I came back to Joey and asked, ‘Can I do it?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, of course you can. I don’t want your skin; you’re going to be dead’.”

Geoff describes the process in unflinching detail. Soon after he dies, his body must be placed in a refrigerator before the skin starts to decay. He has already secured the services of a taxidermist. “There’s a young woman who has a world reputation for preserving the skins of Australian marsupial animals. She’s got all the skills to do it – so it’s not a problem at all.”

Flaying the skin from Geoff’s body will take about a week. He compares the process to stripping valuable wallpaper from a wall.

“If you want to save it in one bit, you’ve got to be very very careful. It’s been done many times in Japan. But this is the first time in the western world that it’s been proposed to an art gallery.”

Geoff wriggles his legs and pulls himself out of the floral armchair. I stand up and meet his gaze. He surveys my face and bare arms, and asks if I have any tattoos myself.

“No, I don’t,” I reply.

I guess I haven’t lived.