Mr Jeremy Langmead reflects on the shock-and-awe campaign waged by his various inkings.

My first tattoo, which I got aged 32, was born from pure boredom. A few friends and I had rented a cottage in a small coastal town in Sussex for a summer weekend and I had gone there a day early for some peace and quiet before the others arrived. Typically, it was pouring with rain and after a few hours sheltering in the house, I decided to potter around the deserted town. There was nothing to peruse but shops selling plastic buckets and spades, sweet stores selling unappetising sticks of candy and a cinema that had recently closed down. Eventually, I stumbled across a dingy-looking tattoo parlour. Oh well, I thought, it might take up some of the afternoon.

I quickly chose an image of a gecko to be inked on one of my shoulder blades – a girl I had fancied at college had had one – and off we went. It was agony. Tattooing bony areas of the body is quite painful, and I was there for nearly two hours.

When my friends arrived that evening they couldn’t believe there was a small lizard, covered in cling film, perched on my back. I was a little surprised, too. I didn’t look like the sort of person who would have a tattoo, especially back then, in the pre-Love Island days, when a tramp stamp was a relative rarity. But since it was hidden away on the back of my shoulder, holidays aside, neither I nor anyone else saw it very often. My gecko didn’t loom large in my life.

Ten years later, however, I began to yearn for a second tattoo, this time a larger, more colourful one on the top of my arm. It features a heart with an arrow in it framed by a twisted rope and anchor. I hope it had nothing to do with the Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male perfume ad, created by Pierre et Gilles, which featured a stylised Jean Genet-inspired sailor, but I suspect that subconsciously it did. I couldn’t help but be amused by the incongruity of it being attached to me, my being more John Craven than Jean Genet in appearance.

The tattoo, which was done at The Family Business, a well-known tattoo parlour in east London, got quite good reviews. My friends looked to heaven but secretly liked it, and my ex-wife and teenage sons were seemingly impressed. Only my mother was horrified. “I didn’t give birth to that!” she exclaimed in horror. A few years later, when my eldest son turned 18, he asked for a tattoo for his birthday. My youngest son did, too, when he reached the same age. It looked like the family from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo had moved into Primrose Hill.

Fast-forward one more decade and the itch for ink returned once more. On my 52nd birthday, a few months ago, my husband (you can’t say I don’t like to try new things) gave me a gift voucher for a tattoo by Mr Mo Coppoletta. Mr Coppoletta owns The Family Business, gets booked up months and months in advance, and has collaborated on projects with brands such as Rolls-Royce, Turnbull & Asser and Montblanc. He’s also on the MR PORTER Style Council.

Mr Coppoletta is the expert, so I asked him what he thought I should have done. I returned a week later to discover he had designed a large, intricate tattoo featuring a fierce-looking tiger pouncing from a fire-strewn sabre. It was extraordinary. He suggested I had it tattooed on the upper half of the arm not already decorated by his colleague’s heart and anchor. “Go for it,” I said as breezily as I had to the man in the seaside town 20 years before.

Mr Coppoletta began by testing different-sized cut-outs of the design to see what would suit the image and my arm the best. To be honest, I had so many emails to attend to on my phone I didn’t pay much attention at this stage. It was the easiest way to avoid the endless buzz and prick of the miniscule needles jabbing in and out of my skin. After a couple of hours, as the pain began to build up – you can only block it out for so long – I peered down to see how it was looking. My eyes nearly popped out of my head, much like the ones on the tiger that had been engraved into my upper arm. The tattoo was enormous. Splendid, but enormous. It was practically a sleeve. Unlike the other one, it wouldn’t disappear under a T-shirt. This one would be peering out at the world for most of the summer. Grrr!

That first session took four hours. It hurt. A fortnight later I returned for another two-hour session to finish it off. A week later, the scabs were cleanly healed – a lot of nappy ointment on the scabbing is the trick – and my new tattoo was now ready to greet the world. Like me, many of my friends and colleagues (although the latter were too polite to say so) were quite surprised at its size and vibrancy. A handful didn’t believe it was real. There were the inevitable jokes, too. “The sabre handle looks like a giant tiger penis.” “Who knew you were such a Kellogg’s Frosties fan?” “I didn’t know Gucci sold stick-on tattoos.” Ho, ho, ho.

A couple of months later, with the hottest summer Britain has had for 40 years, my giant tiger tat has been out and about a great deal, brazenly creeping out from under every short-sleeved shirt I wear. As well as enjoying the age-inappropriate friendship my upper arm now has with this snarling Technicolor beast, I frequently look down and admire its beauty, admire the fact that someone was able to draw and colour such an accurate and intricate design onto a limb rather than a canvas and that, unlike the other paintings I’ve collected over the years, I get to take this one with me wherever I go.