Paul ‘Rambo’ Ramsbottom, who was tattooed by Cash Cooper (right) [© 2024 Rambo’s Tattoo Museum Manchester U.K., All Rights Reserved]

TATTOO artists from across the globe will be reunited next week as they gather to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the first meeting on the London Tattoo Society, held in Clerkenwell.

It was 1955 when Cash Cooper, who was born in Calabria Road, Highbury, initially organised the meeting of tattoo superstars, including Les Skuse and Jessie Knight, in the Horseshoe pub.

Seven decades later, Lal Hardy, a tattoo artist who works in Muswell Hill, says it is time for the pub to be recognised as a “mecca” of the trade.

“We wanted to have this get-together as a chance for people to see each other. The world is changing and people don’t always get that chance anymore. We’ve got people travelling from Holland, Germany, Scotland and America.”

One of the original members, Doc Price, now in his 90s, is making the pilgrimage back to the iconic pub.

Mr Hardy, whose clients have included members of JLS, All Saints, and the Foo Fighters, said museum curators, authors, and tattoo veterans would all be in attendance.

“Tattoo history has become such a major thing. There are collectors from all over the world. There are so many artefacts, drawings and the machinery, signs from the shops, business cards, postcards, autographs… we can show people all these different things.”

Tattoo artist Lal Hardy will be among those gathered at the Horseshoe pub

While Mr Cooper passed away in 1978, he is remembered by fans as a trailblazer who was “ahead of the game”.

Paul “Rambo” Ramsbottom, a tattooist from Manchester and author of Cash Cooper – The Original Rotary Tattoo Artist, said: “He decided to have regular meetings with people and customers. They’d travel all over the world and come back to Islington and have a tattoo. It would have been lovely to have been there. These were real characters who crafted their skills and protected their trade.”

Rambo told the Tribune how Mr Cooper had inked him for the very first time.

He said: “When I was a kid I used to go to his tattoo parlour and it was the most magical place I’d ever been to. When I was 13, he did me my very first tattoo. I had my name, ‘Rambo’.”

He added: “He didn’t wrap it up with a bandage, he used to have a bottle of fluid he would dab on your tattoo. It would leave a dirty-brown mustard glow around the tattoo. He had some tall story about how it was a liquid he had brought back from his travels to China. I think it was probably just a mix of Dettol and iodine.”

Rambo even recalls how a friend of his, aged 10, had asked Mr Cooper for a tattoo, but was told he would need his mother’s permission.

“He said to come back with a note from your mother and I’ll do it. So my friend, Barry, brought his mother. It’s mental now to think that a mother would do that.”

Tattooing minors was the least of Mr Cooper’s worries as in 1960s Manchester, he would often suffer break-ins to the parlour. One day he decided to take drastic measures.

Rambo said: “He went to Tib Street and you could buy anything there – snakes, cats, lions – so he decided to buy a puma.

“He got hold of the ‘please be aware of the dog’ sign and scrubbed off ‘dog’ and wrote ‘pub’. He was so excited with the purchase that he went to a wine bar for a beer and they were both arrested for drunk and disorderly because the puma went mad in the pub. The manager of the zoo was drafted in.”

He added: “Islington should be proud of this mad man.”