WHEN a middle-aged mother from Surrey walked into Selfridges to have her hip tattooed with the label of her favourite French wine, it confirmed a trend: tattooing has become socially acceptable.

The demand from this new market is the reason that Selfridges, the 80-year-old department store in Oxford Street, Central London, announced yesterday that its temporary tattoo parlour is to be kept open indefinitely.

The Tattoo Club of Great Britain said that the move was “the beginning of the end”, but others looked forward eagerly to the radical changes this new swath of customers — female, middle-aged first-timers — would bring to the art. For it seems that large numbers of ladies who lunch have been waiting for this moment.

“I don’t want ‘Mum’ and a heart on my arm. I am a mum,” said Claudia Harris, 42, flicking through the tattoo catalogues on a black leather sofa in the ground-floor young fashions section.

The women are definitely going for the top end of the market, according to Greg Johnson, the head tattooist. “One had the name Louis Vuitton right across her lower back,” he said. Tattoos are not the only body adornment in demand. Mr Johnson said that one woman arrived at the desk and said: “I want the most expensive thing you’ve got.” She was directed to a £2,100 platinum navel piercing with white diamonds.

Selfridges asked Metal Morphosis, a Soho tattoo and piercing parlour, to open in-store for their Body Craze promotion five weeks ago. Since then, 500 West End shoppers have had tattoos and 700 have had piercings.

James Thomas, who manages the tattoo parlour, said the level of demand had shocked the store. “The consensus is that it’s a very odd concept to have a tattoo place here, but for tattooists this is the natural progression of a trend over the last ten years,” he said.

Women piercing customers outnumber men, and they are conservative in their choices, almost always wanting navel and ear piercings rather than the more adventurous sites requested in Soho.

The typical tattoo customer — 50-50 between the sexes — is older than the traditional sailor or rock star. Most are in their thirties or forties and are trying it for the first time.

“We are always getting taken by surprise when a mother comes with her daughter and it’s the mother not the daughter who wants a flower on her bottom,” Mr Thomas said.

Selfridges customers are often dissatisfied with the traditional catalogue and order “off menu”. Small tattoos start at £60, going up to £600 for a complicated design.

When the woman came in with a wine bottle and asked him to reproduce the picture of the vineyard, Mr Johnson thought it was an eccentric one-off. Since then two other women had requested images from wine bottles.

“I find it really rewarding that tattooing is no longer, as the French say, for criminals and Germans,” he said.

It was this perception that persuaded Peter Williams, Selfridges’ chief executive, that “people who would never dream of going to a back-street shop would walk through here and think, well, if Selfridges are doing it, it must be OK.”

He added, however: “We don’t offer our normal 28-day returns policy, so this could be a dangerous impulse buy. I asked my teenage sons about me getting a tattoo, maybe a little yellow Selfridges bag, but they just rolled their eyes.”

Michelle Fraser, 40, and Cathy Porter, 38, up for the day from Surrey for navel piercings, unbeknown to their husbands and children, agreed with Mr Williams. “I’d wanted to get it done for ages but never had the bottle for a seedy place,” Mrs Fraser said. “So instead of shopping for hats we’ve come up to get our piercings. After having children it should be a doddle.”

Curly Moore, from the Tattoo Club of Great Britain, was not impressed. “It’s made it so boringly acceptable,” he said. “The point of tattooing is that it has an anti-social angle. It’s not exactly something you would buy in Selfridges.”

Tracing history

• The oldest known tattoo is on the 5,000-year-old body found between Austria and Italy. It had a cross on the knee and lines on the ankles
• The naturalist Sir Joseph Banks brought the word “tattoo” into common usage in Britain after seeing the practice in Polynesia
• King Harold’s body was identified after the Battle of Hastings by his tattoos. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, had the Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his arm in 1862
• Tattooists’ linguistic skills cannot be trusted. David Beckham has his wife’s name misspelt as “Vihctoria” in Hindi. One grieving woman wanted “Angel”, but got “Angle”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Margot Fonteyn: In her footsteps
• Forget beautiful people, let's have wonky Brits
• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power