Lal Hardy was born in 1958 and, although widely travelled, has spent most of his life living and working around Muswell Hill, in north London, where he opened his studio, New Wave Tattoo, in 1979. He is the author of three bestselling Mammoth collections of tattoos and tattoo art.
Matt Lodder's PhD thesis was entitled 'Body Art: Body Modification as Artistic Practice' and his current research is principally concerned with the history of Western tattooing and the artistic status of body art and body modification practices. He has taught contemporary art and theory at the Universities of Reading and Birmingham and contributed to and served as an expert consultant on a number of television and radio programmes on body art and body modification. He is the author of Tattoo: An Art History and is currently Director of American Studies in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at the University of Essex.