Liam Sparkes
Liam Sparkes is at war – with everything. Has been since he was a boy. Age 11 he sent a sketch of an armoured personnel carrier to the Queen. The London tattooist, raised on tales of conflict from grandparents who had manned frigates and parachuted behind enemy lines during the war, thought she might need it. She didn’t. Slouching on the reception couch at Old Habits Tattoo, the east London parlour on Kingsland Road for which he is proprietor, Sparkes’ stories all tail-back to battle and even his 10-eye military boots, like his body, bear the scars of many tours of, not so much duty, but debauchery, for the 38-year-old’s appetite for destruction largely sees him seek and destroy – himself. “I feel like life is war. It definitely feels like it, in every sense of the word,” he says fanging back fags. “Going away to foreign countries. Fighting a war there. Getting a chopper out. Getting sewn back up at home base, then going back out for more. I like to go hard really and I really don’t know when it will stop.” Sparkes’ party-boy reputation is well earned but it is a sideshow in the circus of his creative process that sees him dowsing in the darkness of his urges and sifting through the ashes of experience for the essence of his art. Not the beautiful kind that’s instantly admired and easily forgotten, but the brutality and absurdity imbedded in the ugly that sits in the throat and stains the subconscious. “I am working 24/7,” he explains of his all-consuming approach that sees his art not so much imitate his life, but become it: “All the shit that I like to go and do comes out.” (Sparkes’ Instagram stories have the kaleidoscopic-styling of an acid trip – actuality not accidentally achieved by the auteur.) He adds: “It’s more just a lust for life and I just feel like I need to get shit done, sooner rather than later, and thus the war on time, the war on myself, the war on life. War.” Sparkes is admirably liberated and earnest as his eyes are blue in his pursuit of not only pleasure but professional and personal fulfilment.
There is a method to his madness and it is of purity far stronger than the pills and potions he necks to fuel it, which is often all that is spoken of. For Sparkes, everything comes from the same cauldron, so everything must go in. Brutal tattoos, it seems, require a thick broth of experience for the applicator to draw from to ensure authenticity. “That’s the truest… that’s integrity at the end. That’s the only way you should be. You have to do everything, with everything. You have to use everything you have as one thing. I couldn’t see it any other way really. You embody your art,” he explains. Sparkes doesn’t so much personify his art – he is it in its crudest form, exorcised and ready to die again. His body is a museum of the etchings of the early blackwork pioneers, Duncan X and Thomas Hooper, and his style owes a lot not only to them, but his grandparents stories, which are the genesis of everything. Collecting tattoos, Sparkes opines, is a “destruction and an ornamentation of the body”. “I realised when I started getting tattooed that this body is just a vessel and you can do whatever you want with it, and I was like, ‘why didn’t I destroy it sooner?’” Everyone, Sparkes later explains stoically, “Deserves a chance to be destroyed”. War craft were among the first things Sparkes drew as a kid. Soldiers later became thugs, the ugliness of their pronounced brow won him over: “It just looked better. And I guess that kind of works with the tattooing now. Bad, ugly, shit looks better than something mega hot, mega beautiful. “I don’t know why. That’s my taste maybe. Beauty and imperfection, imperfection in beauty, maybe it’s a fascination with that.”
