Comedian and artist Harriet Richardson has permanently tattooed the names of the mothers of every man she has ever slept with onto her body – including two she had to hire a private detective to track down.
The Manchester-born performer now has 15 women’s names running down her body in chronological order, beginning with the mother of the first man she slept with and ending with the most recent.
It is Richardson’s first and only tattoo – particularly significant considering she doesn’t actually like tattoos very much – and forms part of her performance art project Temporary.
‘Temporary is essentially the name of the one woman that every man holds apart from all others in his life,’ Richardson told Metro.
‘The one holy woman on the body of someone who’s more often than not deemed temporary.’
Richardson initially knew 12 of the names from diaries, memories, and having met the families of previous partners.
Two proved considerably harder to find.
‘I’m a relationship girly, so I’ve always sort of known the mothers,’ she explained. ‘And there were two names that I didn’t know from one-night stands that happened in the pandemic, so I got a private detective to help me find them.
‘I’ve always wanted a reason to hire a private detective. You’ve just heard me go on about obsession for half an hour – I’ve always wanted a reason, and I finally found one.’
She later discovered another name, bringing the tattoo’s current total to 15.
It would be easy to write the entire thing off as an exceptionally elaborate way of making 15 men panic every time their mothers call. But underneath the deliberately provocative headline – and Richardson is very aware of how provocative it is – there’s a more serious point about sex, memory and who gets to decide when an encounter matters.
Richardson deliberately chose not to tattoo the men’s names because, quite simply, she ‘deeply’ didn’t want a man’s name on her body.
Instead, she became increasingly fascinated by their mothers, women she believes may have experienced some of the same frustrations of loving the men she had.
‘Every single one of these people have played a role in your life, whether it was for an evening or four years,’ she said.
‘They were more sort of pivotal or poignant to me than any of the men were because I actually think that woman’s had a pretty similar experience to me.’
But there’s another motivation behind Temporary too: power.
Richardson said several of the men she had shorter encounters with – including male comedians – seemed to want to ‘erase’ her afterwards.
‘They wanted it to have not happened, or were embarrassed, or whatever the thing is,’ she said. ‘The tattoo is a way of being like: “No, you can’t just do that and then never speak to me again.” I mean, you can, but it doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the internet has had some thoughts.
Temporary has travelled into some particularly furious corners of social media, although Richardson – who previously worked in marketing and graphic design – knew exactly what she was doing.
In fact, she says she often thinks about her artwork in headlines before anything else.
‘The headline is: “Woman gets tattoo of mothers’ names of men she slept with,”’ she laughed. ‘It’s so hard to not bite at that.’
The reaction has exposed an interesting gender divide. Richardson said women have largely responded with variations of ‘this is f***ing fantastic’, while some men – particularly American men – have been rather less delighted.
Even the number of names has become a bizarre Rorschach test for strangers’ attitudes towards women’s sex lives.
Some have told her 15 sexual partners makes her practically a virgin and that she needs to ‘get out more’; others have told her they’d be deeply ashamed to have slept with that many people.
Richardson isn’t particularly bothered by either camp.
‘Of course it’s provocative,’ she said. ‘I wonder whether those people realise that what they’re having is a deep reaction to a piece of art.’
Growing up in a household where art felt as though it belonged to ‘rich people or posh people’, she finds something satisfying about people furiously debating performance art without necessarily realising that’s what they’re doing.
‘Tell me that you’ve ever stood in an art gallery and shouted at a painting,’ she joked.
Temporary isn’t entirely separate from the work that has brought Richardson to Edinburgh Fringe this summer.
Her one-woman show Creep begins with another spectacularly messy premise: the parasocial relationship Richardson formed with a celebrity before eventually having an affair with him.
But that’s only the framework.
The show ultimately examines her lifelong tendency towards romantic obsession and the uncomfortable realisation that the object of an obsession can be almost incidental to it.
After nearly eight years of therapy – and what she estimates have been 15, 16 or 17 iterations of essentially the same romantic pattern – Richardson came to see obsession as a means of avoiding herself.
‘I’d much rather channel all of that into a very mediocre man that I can obsess over every single detail,’ she said.
‘I think it’s like having a hobby, but the hobby is on steroids.’
The pattern became impossible to ignore: fixation, obsession, rejection, ghosting and eventually the horrible realisation that she’d done it again.
She now likens the cycle to addiction.
At stressful points in her life, she can still catch herself wondering what a particular man is doing before recognizing that she doesn’t actually care all that much; she’s just looking for somewhere else to put her attention.
‘Yearning feels safer than having something real to lose,’ she tells audiences towards the end of Creep.
As part of attempting to break that cycle, Richardson also became celibate while developing the show.
She lasted 10 months.
The decision wasn’t about sex itself, she explained, but the knowledge that intimacy can become a catalyst for her obsessive tendencies. Having committed a year of her life – and around £16,000 – to taking Creep to Edinburgh, the last thing she needed was another man spectacularly derailing proceedings.
That £16,000 gamble has, remarkably, paid off.
Richardson arrived in Edinburgh prepared to lose several thousand pounds, knowing performers can need to sell around 80% of their tickets simply to break even.
Instead, Creep sold out its entire run and she has now been booked for additional performances, including two-show days.
‘The fact that the whole run sold out is absolutely crazy,’ she said.
Success at Fringe, however, comes with its own peculiar psychological torture.
Richardson described suddenly finding herself surrounded by thousands of performers experiencing exactly the same anxieties, including close friends who are inevitably also competitors.
‘I sort of walk down the street feeling like there isn’t anyone on this street that doesn’t want me to get hit by a car,’ she joked.
Not seriously injured, obviously. Perhaps just a foot.
‘You want your friends to do well, you just don’t want them to do as well as you.’
Then there’s the exhaustion, the strange return to schoolyard social dynamics and, perhaps most distressingly, the near-impossibility of finding vegetables.
‘September’s going to be me in bed having, like, broccoli,’ she said.
For all its comedy, Creep is extraordinarily exposing. Richardson said the most common response she gets is disbelief that she’s willing to tell strangers so much about herself.
That’s precisely what she enjoys about it. After years of worrying about perception, judgement and saying the wrong thing, standing onstage and voluntarily presenting the ugliest parts of herself has become unexpectedly liberating.
‘These are the very worst parts of me,’ she said of what she offers audiences. ‘And if you can get on board by the end of that hour, then we might be friends – in a parasocial way.’
People have cried during every Fringe performance so far. Richardson often ends up crying with them.
And if there is a neat thread connecting Creep with the 15 mothers now permanently written across her body, perhaps it’s Richardson’s refusal to let shame decide which parts of her life are allowed to count.
The tattoo itself embodies that more literally than anything else she’s made.
Richardson never imagined herself getting one. She never imagined becoming a comedian either. By 30, she thought she’d be married with a child.
Instead, she is at Edinburgh Fringe performing a sold-out show about an affair and romantic obsession with the mothers of every man she’s slept with tattooed down her body.
‘I see it as a massive commitment to art above all else,’ she said. ‘Putting it on my body, my most sacred possession, feels like the biggest commitment that I could ever have made.’
And as for whether the men themselves are horrified?
There is one considerable flaw in waiting for a dramatic reaction from a collection of men you’ve specifically selected for their emotional unavailability.
‘The thing about dating avoidant men,’ Richardson conceded, ‘is it’s very unlikely they’re ever going to react.’
