BBC Radio 2 presenter Bob Harris gets first ‘tipsy tequila tattoo’ at 77

Radio presenter “Whispering” Bob Harris has had his first tattoo at the age of 77, after a “tipsy” night on tequila.

Harris was inked during a weekend at the Country 2 Country musical festival in London, encouraged by young musician Jackson Dean.

He shared the news on social media, posting a photograph showing four small dashes on his wrist

“Tipsy tequila tattoo. It’s a long story...” he wrote and went on to explain the circumstances to Radio 2 listeners.

“So there’s an artist who played over the weekend called Jackson Dean and he’s got a lot of tattoos. He’s only 23 years old. He was on my show and we got talking,” said Harris, who was broadcasting from the festival at the O2 arena.

“There was a backstage tattooist and I’ve always wanted to get the word ‘skylight’ tattooed somewhere on me because years ago I did an interview with Mike Oldfield and we were in the studio at the bottom of his garden and it was a very, very wet day and he had a skylight that was open.

“Before we started the interview, I said to him that maybe we should close the skylight because the rain was going to get in. And he said, ‘I couldn’t possibly do that.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘Because that’s where the ideas come in.’

“And I thought, ‘Actually, I really like that.’ It’s also symbolic of an open mind. It has great connotations for me.”

Dean suggested that he could do the tattoo himself at the parlour in the O2. “But the thing was, it was 11.30 at night and we’d had a couple of tequilas,” Harris said.

“We got down to the tattoo parlour and it was immediately obvious to me that getting the whole word done was not really an option.

“He’d already started sketching out the edges of the ‘s’ so I said, ‘If you extend those four lines and I know that it’s symbolic of this world, I’ll always be able to look at it and know what it means.

“So, all it is, it’s on the inside of my right wrist and it’s four lines. They represent the skylight – always keeping your skylight open.”

The former Old Grey Whistle Test presenter is not the only septuagenarian to get a tattoo. In 2013, David Dimbleby had his first at the age of 75.

“You are only old once. I have always wanted a tattoo,” he said afterwards. “It’s a dream come true for me.”

He took the plunge while making a BBC documentary, Britain and the Sea, which explored the idea that tattoos were introduced to the West as a result of Captain Cook’s South Sea adventures.

Dimbleby had a scorpion etched on his right shoulder, representing his star sign, and said he “thought of Winston Churchill having his done while mine was being done” to distract from the stinging sensation.

Churchill is said to have had an anchor tattooed on his arm.