By Steve Dow
At 15, aspiring chef Zac Pauling was marked for life, but wanted more. It was the day after his high-school formal and he was hung-over. His mother returned early from work to discover Pauling's cousin inking a Christian cross on her son's back using a new tattoo kit.
''She wasn't the happiest about it,'' laughs Pauling, who today, at 24, sports an Errol Flynn-like thin moustache and a dense pastiche of tattoo art from the neck down. ''But half an hour later she came around.''
He is standing in the hipster Anchor bar he helped open on Bondi's Campbell Parade beach strip last year. Hospitality has always had a ''rock star'' element, Pauling says, but a ''lot more'' chefs are proudly getting tattoos than in years gone by.
Tattooed chefs say this is not only because the tattoo business is booming to cater to a new generation - some artists have months-long waiting lists - but also because kitchens opening to scrutiny in restaurants and the celebrity chef phenomenon have brought even shy chefs and their skin canvases into view.
And far from harming Pauling's chef ambitions, the visible tattoos amassed on his upper body this past decade made his career. Having apprenticed at both Terroir, near his Cessnock childhood home, and Vue de Monde in Melbourne, Pauling had been in Sydney two weeks working in a bar when people asked: ''Do you work at Bodega?''
He'd never heard of the Surry Hills tapas restaurant, but his tattoo inventory rivalled that of Bodega's rockabilly chefs, Ben Milgate and Elvis Abrahanowicz. So Pauling sent his CV. The pair quickly declared: come work at our second restaurant, Porteno. Milgate and Abrahanowicz made people realise you ''don't have to be clean-cut to be good at your trade'', Pauling says.
Consider, he says, Anthony Bourdain: the 55-year-old No Reservations US TV host and chef coolly wears half-a-dozen tattoos, including matching body art with his wife Ottavia Busia; identical snakes and knives with a drop of blood. ''He's the original rock-star chef for me,'' Pauling says. ''I'd always wanted to be a chef, but when I read Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, it cemented my decision.''
Yet Bourdain's inked inner arms, shoulder and biceps have nothing on Pauling's torso canvas, including two sets of praying hands on each side of his neck. One set belongs to God, the other, the devil. A cursive script reading ''And then came love'' was inked across his chest from shoulder to shoulder when he got engaged to his current partner.
''I'm not a religious person at all,'' says Pauling, whose Italian Catholicism from his father's side vies with rockabilly and hipster influences. ''But I have a little faith and like to think there's something else.'' On his right arm is a koi fish, a Japanese garden and a Buddha giving the thumbs-up; on his left hand an old-school sailor tattoo - Pauling's grandfather served in the navy - and on that arm gypsy girls, cutthroat razor and dice.
Pauling says he regrets getting the name ''Simone'' on one arm - ''bad mistake; ex-girlfriend'' - while the motif ''pride and destruction'' should have read ''pride is destruction''. The tattooist was drunk.
Over at Porteno, Pauling's old boss, Ben Milgate, 32, says he got his first tattoo on holiday in Peru at age 25; a half-sleeve tribal Incan design on one arm. Then came a Japanese design and more ''old-school'' designs on his back, legs and chest. At least 50 per cent of his body is covered.
Fellow Bodega-Porteno chef Elvis Abrahanowicz, also 32, has a torso covered in tattoos, with a script reading ''Esperanza'' (Spanish for hope) across his chest and ''Viva la Milonga'' (a style of tango) flanking an accordion-like musical instrument, a bandoneon, on his stomach. Actors and musicians are now getting more tattoos alongside chefs, Abrahanowicz says; the old association between tattoos and criminals has been swept aside. ''It's more accepted in society.''
The Bodega-Porteno boys' advice for young chefs: don't work over open heat with a fresh tattoo. It stings.
Others have turned over their body to a living record of family. On his right forearm, butcher and restaurant supplier Anthony Puharich has the initials of his children, Max, Alessandra and Jet, and two children's full names on his back - ''very painful'' to get done - and the third on an inner-arm. The 38-year-old's right wrist marks his 1999 wedding date.
Puharich's background is Croatian: his tattoo ''Buzaga'' is a sentimental and significant term of endearment and respect passed down from his butcher grandfather to Puharich's butcher father Victor, who migrated to Australia in 1970, to Puharich.
His business name, ''Victor Churchill: Fine Family Butcher'', is an amalgam of Puharich's father's name and the original Churchill family butcher business, founded in Woollahra in 1876.
''My tattoos are very, very personal,'' Puharich says. ''I'm sure my mother would prefer me not to have tattoos.'' Yet she's reassured each one ''represents significant personal moments in my life or people I love, care for and respect''.
Likewise, chef Giovanni Pilu, 42, of Pilu at Freshwater, has his children's names, Martino and Sofia, on his inside upper arm and the names of his brothers and sister on his left calf. ''People go: 'Oh, man, what's that on the back of your leg; your recipe for suckling pig or something?','' he says.
Under his wedding ring are the initials ''m'' and ''u'', which has a meaning only he and his wife know.
For others, inking sends a message to all: chef Claire van Vuuren, 32, of Bloodwood in Newtown, sees hertattoos as a character statement. ''You can't wear jewellery in the kitchen but tattoos allow your personality to shine through,'' she says.
The art also indicates resilience: ''As a girl you have to be a little bit tough … it's a hard job and you have to prove yourself; it's a male-dominated industry. You have to hold your personality strong. Otherwise, you will be squashed …
''We're not really girls you mess with in the kitchen,'' she laughs.
Tattoo-wise, van Vuuren favours plain, black rectangles inspired by the borders of a National Geographic cover; she likes neatness and structure.
Her Bloodwood offsider, Barcelona-born chef Olivia Serrano, 33, has splashed out with colour, including a jellyfish - tattooed after a real one stung her last year at Gordons Bay, near Clovelly.
Less traumatic was the build-up to Hamish Ingham's most recent tattoo: he was so exhausted after opening Bar H in Surry Hills he fell asleep in the tattooist's chair.
Ingham, 37, has a phoenix on his inside forearm, being ''obsessed'' with its rising-from-the-ashes mythology. He's getting the phoenix on his shoulder extended to spread across his back to cover an ''om'' tattooed when he was 18. ''That was in my hippie days,'' he says quietly, smiling.
For others, there is not only a love of the tattoo aesthetic but practical considerations: the head chef of Surry Hills' Beresford Hotel, Reid Hingston, 30, is growing a tattoo jungle across his body - tiger, rattlesnake, phoenix and koi amid detailed foliage - after realising his skin would get pan burns and scars in the kitchen anyway.
''A lot of chefs get tattoos because it doesn't affect their work - we're not the normal nine-to-five class,'' he says, swapping his chef whites for a singlet for the photographer.
As tattooing's popularity grows among adults, it remains a touchstone for teenage rebellion. Yet pastry chef and macaron man Adriano Zumbo didn't get inked until six years ago, when he had a scorpion, the symbol of his star sign, tattooed on his right shoulder.
As a Scorpio, the 30-year-old reckons he's ''very sexual, very passionate, very loyal - but I can be quite secretive''.
No stranger to teenage rebellion, he smoked in front of his mother at age 13 and had a hard time at school. ''I couldn't pay attention to a novel; I'd get three pages in and couldn't remember what it was about,'' he says, decked out in white in his bustling Adriano Zumbo patisserie at The Star in Pyrmont, where he can focus, being in his element. ''I knew I wouldn't have an academic career because I wasn't good at school.''
Zumbo left school at age 15 to work in his sister's bakery. And while he didn't read much, he loved movies: particularly Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Further down his right arm is a tattoo of Gene Wilder in a top hat, as Wonka the factory owner. ''It created the dream for me, that fantasy. I wanted to make pastry.''
Flanking the Wilder tattoo is a rooster and a coquettish showgirl holding macarons. On Zumbo's left arm are scarab beetles - good luck charms - and ''6'' and ''11'', numbers to which the clock's hands are often puzzlingly pointing whenever Zumbo checks the time.
Zumbo says pastry and other chefs particularly want to display their creativity and individuality - but what took him so long to get inked? ''I don't know,'' he says. ''I always wanted one. At 24 I'd just started my business. So I took the plunge.''
He says the fear of pain may have been one cause for the delay. Yes, the scorpion stung. Now, Zumbo is contemplating a long script for his next tattoo on an undecided location on his body: ''There are no mistakes in life … only experiences,'' he says.
For more photos, see smh.com.au /goodliving