“Troublingly, a decade-long study (2011-2020) of deaths in South Australia found that men with Ned Kelly tattoos were around two and a half times more likely to commit suicide and a staggering nine and a half times more likely to be murdered .

In all my opportunities to portray Ned indelibly on a working-class patriot, I was never once asked to tattoo an image of him sobbing in his cell the night before he was hanged. Such human complexity, it seems, has no place. In fact, the first black and grey tattoo (using shades of watered-down black ink, relying entirely on tonal relationships without colour) I ever did was an image of Ned, looking down the barrel of an admittedly anachronistically modern rifle, when I was around sixteen years of age. Keen to learn how it had healed—as such archival concerns are as important to the fledgling tattooer as they ought to be for an aspiring painter—I was disheartened to learn, a week or so later, that it had not healed and never would.

The customer—a mate of my dad’s mate Casey, whose name sadly escapes me—had been found, presumably murdered, head down in a North Queensland Mangrove swamp. In what could be darkly be considered a slight silver lining, they had been able to identify the now headless body thanks to the aforementioned fresh tattoo on his leg. Such is life.”