T(w)attoos & Nipple Piercings

If you’ve ever either taken part or watched an Ironman race (or pretty much any longer distance triathlon), you will probably have seen a few people sporting the famous M-dot tattoo.

So the ‘big’ question is “To ink or not to ink?”  (To be fair, it’s not that ‘big’ a question like how do we solve poverty, create peace across thh globe etc etc)

There are a million words or more written about this subject if you search the web. Some people love them, some people think you should only have the logo tattooed if you’ve been to Hawaii and competed. Others just think they are plain stupid.  That’s the group that refer to them as ‘twattoos’.

When I registered for my first half Ironman race in Wimbleball I stood behind a German guy who was sporting a big red M-dot tattoo. I took one look at it and said to my mate Paul that I thought it was ridiculous to put a brand logo on your leg just because you’d got round an Ironman – after all, just because I shop at Tesco doesn’t mean I’d be happy to have a big Tesco logo slapped on my leg/back/arm. His view was completely different & we agreed, after some debate, that if we ever completed a full Ironman, we’d book in and get tattoos.

15 months later when we both finished Ironman Austria, we agreed to ‘get

them done’. It wasn’t quite as I’d imagined in that there wasn’t a demon tattoo artist at the finish line where you paid your fifty Euros and got officially ‘inked’. Instead we booked into Carvilles of Windsor (it’s actually in Slough!) and both had the M-dot logo’s tattooed on our ankles by a bloke called ‘Dog’.  Glamourous… not really, and I’m not sure that they count David Beckham or Cheryl Cole Fernandez-Versini amongst their clientele!

Anyway, roll the clock forward nine years and Kevin, my brother, and I are stood at the start line of Ironman Wales where we agreed that should we both get round, we’d make a visit to have some more tats done!

You won’t feel a thing….

Seth working his magic

The ‘Brutal’ Logo

Call it a mid-life crisis if you want, but I decided to have the flags of the countries I’d raced M-dots put above my M-dot and the logo for Brutal Triathlons put on my calf.  (Brutal Events run some amazing events including the Brutal Triathlon in Llanberis, North Wales and the Jurrasicman, a point-to-point Iron-distance race along the Jurassic coastline in Dorset).

So four new tattoos for me and Kev’s first.  All I needed now was the Harley and a dodgy beard.

Long and short is that I love them.  They are a talking point, a conversation starter (that awkward time when you’re standing cold and shivering before a race starts when somebody asks “which one you’ve done”) and, most of all for me, a reminder of the races that have made me laugh and cry in equal measure – the races that have become interesting parts of a normal blokes history.

So quite frankly I can’t wait until I (hopefully) cross the line in Kona and I
can book myself back into Attattooed in Wokingham.. Seth, the resident artist is possibly the nicest bloke you could hope to meet and a really talented guy.  He also does nipple piercings, but that’s another story…