The Tattooed Lady

Meet Cindy Ray: 'The classy lassie with the tattooed chassis'

In the early 1960s, photographs of a heavily tattooed woman from Australia called Cindy Ray started appearing.

She was blonde and beautiful with tattoos on her arms, chest, back and legs and soon became known as "the classy lassie with the tattooed chassis".

The woman behind the name Cindy Ray is Bev Nicholas, who turns 73 this year. She was Australia's original tattooed lady, becoming a sideshow attraction, a pin-up overseas and one of the country's first female tattoo artists.

I went and got three large tattoos down one arm and a wrist band on the other. So I've gone home and of course my parents had no idea I was going to do this and they just hit the roof good and proper.

Cindy Ray was the creation of eccentric Melbourne photographer Harry Bartram, who convinced her to get tattooed with the promise of fame and fortune.

Ms Nicholas says she was a single mother when she answered his advertisement in the paper looking for models who were willing to shave their eyebrows.

Bartram photographed Ms Nicholas's transition into Australia's tattooed lady and then sold the pictures in America through a mail order business.

He also sold Cindy Ray tattoo machines and books.

While Ms Nicholas's new life as Cindy Ray brought fame, she never saw any of the fortune.

I'm sitting in the shop and I'm dreading somebody coming in and then some bloke comes in then he walks straight back out, 'hey it's a sheila tattooing in there'! Like, shock horror!

Ms Nicholas started tattooing when her tattoo artist boyfriend broke his hand in a pub brawl.

She worked out of a shop on the waterfront in Williamstown, outside of Melbourne, where in the 1960s and '70s there was an endless supply of sailors to tattoo.

Horrible, horrible. People all staring at you. I even had a police woman come in and try and scrub them off because they thought it was a big fake and we were taking money off people under false pretences.

In a time when there were almost no women with tattoos, many people were willing to pay to go and see such a thing.

So Ms Nicholas became a sideshow attraction, but she didn't like the attention.

He (Bartram) was making money out of it. He even had a full-time secretary handling this and he'd have me writing letters to people, telling me what to write to them and next thing they're buying all these supplies.

Ms Nicholas says she doesn't know how much money Bartram made from Cindy Ray, but she has no doubt it would have been lucrative.

American Cindy Ray enthusiasts still come to visit her.

But Ms Nicholas didn't see any money from the Cindy Ray business and admits she was taken advantage of.

I didn't think they hurt. I wished to god they would have hurt like hell. I wouldn't have gone through with this. I do regret getting the elbow to the wrist and I should never have got the bottom of my legs tattooed.

Five decades and several thousand tattoos on, Bev Nicholas is still working ink into skin from a tattoo studio in Melbourne.

The Cindy Ray days are over, but she still has the scars to prove it.

She says she's surprised how many people are getting tattooed these days and warns that tattoos look great when you're young, but they too get old

Topics: human-interest