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Inside the world’s oldest tattoo shop

Imagine Copenhagen, and perhaps the very first thing that comes to mind is Nyhavn. Virtually anytime the Danish capital is highlighted in the international media, it’s a good bet that the story will be anchored by a beautiful shot of the harbour’s colourful buildings and bustling crowds.

Inside the world's oldest tattoo shop
Majbritt Petersen has owned Tattoo Ole since 2010, the first female owner in its storied history. Photo: Davut Çolak
But what many may not realize is that tucked into the basement of the iconic Nyhavn 17 building, with its orange facade and red letters, is a piece of cultural history that is in danger of disappearing. 
 
The modest underground locale has hosted a tattoo artist since 1884, making it the world’s oldest still functioning tattoo parlour. For nearly a century, the shop was the only place in all of Scandinavia to get tattooed. Its initial clientele was primarily sailors and prostitutes and today the shop is one of the last vestiges of Nyhavn’s seedy past. 
 
Over the years, the shop was owned by a number of colourful characters including ‘Tattoo Ole’ Hansen, who became renowned the world over for his ship tattoos and hand-made tattoo machines. Tattoo Ole’s name has graced the shop since 1947 and inside you will still find a proudly-displayed photo of his most famous client, King Frederik IX. 
 
Tattoo aficionados from around the world make the pilgrimage to Denmark just to get inked at Tattoo Ole, where current owner Majbritt ‘Lille Ole’ Petersen and Michael Ramsø Thomsen continue the tradition established before them. 
 
 
But Tattoo Ole’s days may be numbered. The owner of the building has declined to renew the tattoo parlour’s lease and has plans to convert the historic location into extra kitchen space for the restaurant that operates on the other levels. 
 
Petersen, who has owned the shop since 2010, said that she desperately wants to keep Tattoo Ole’s rich tradition alive and doesn’t want its 133-year history to end on her watch. 
 
“It’s not just my shop, even if it is my shop today. It is also all the other guys’ shop who had it before,” she told me when I visited the parlour to get an old-school ‘Ole ship’ tattoo.  
 
“Everyone who has had this shop is not family related, but everyone has worked together. We have a commitment to keep the shop in the old spirit. Before I took over the shop I was learning from the guy who had the shop before me and so on and so on,” Petersen added. 
 
The owner of the Nyhavn 17 wants to convert the tattoo shop into kitchen space. Photo: Davut Çolak
The owner of the Nyhavn 17 wants to convert the tattoo shop into kitchen space. Photo: Davut Çolak“
 
“People have come here for generations to get tattoos. We’ve tattooed grandparents and then the parents and then the kids when they get old. They want to come back here because it is familiar and it is very special to come here,” she said. 
 
According to Petersen, it is not just the global history of tattooing that would suffer a blow if Tattoo Ole is forced out. She says an important piece of Copenhagen will be lost forever if Nyhavn is further sanitized into a tourist destination.
 
“[Nyhavn] has a very dark past. There used to be only hookers and thieves and the scum of the scum. Nobody wanted to live in Nyhavn. Danes used to say that you’d know you reached Nyhavn when you got a knife stuck in your back,” she said. “This fancy area is very young, it started in the 1980s. This is one of the only old places left of Nyhavn – what Nyhavn was once.”
 
Both Petersen and fans of the tattoo parlour from around the world are putting up a last-ditch effort to save Tattoo Ole. Petersen, who is the first female owner in the shop’s long history, is contesting the owner’s decision to terminate her lease, arguing that its historical value is worth preserving. She will present her case in court on September 14th. 
 
Likewise, a petition has been started to try to sway the building’s owners into reversing course. It has attracted nearly 7,000 signatures from within Denmark and countries including Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Sweden, the UK and the US. 

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TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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