A man covered in tattoos who is the talk of his town has opened the doors of his home for the first time to reveal the story behind his ink.

Paul Kidson has become a familiar face in Newquay, Cornwall, sporting dozens of tattoos across his face and body.

He lives in a ground-floor flat on his own, adorned with dozens of red trinkets ranging from clocks, to shoes and wigs stacked on his shelves.

Paul refuses to invite people to his home because many had robbed him in the past, he said.

In an exclusive interview with Cornwall Live , Paul revealed his adventurous life story – from a broken childhood to travelling the world, and marrying four times along the way.

He said: “I don’t have many people in here. In all the time I’ve been here – three years – I’ve only had six or seven people inside. I don’t let people in, because my trust in a lot of people has gone since I got robbed.”

Paul is referring to the time he was burgled when he lived in Blackpool around seven years ago.

Not only did they take all his money, but he says they also ripped up old photos of his mother, who had recently died.

This, on top of mounting solicitor bills from a divorce, led Paul to try and take his own life. It was his first suicide attempt, but sadly, not his last.

Inside Paul’s flat, it is almost impossible to see where the floor ends, the walls begin and the painted ceiling starts. With every available space filled with colour coordinated red objects, and the room temperature hitting 30 degrees, his tiny home feels almost womblike.

Paul was born in Harrogate Hospital at 2.10am on a very snowy 2 of January 1958. He says that years later, his mother would tell him that his father’s first words when he came to visit the hospital were: “I didn’t want a boy, I wanted a girl”.

Growing up in a small village near Thirsk in Yorkshire – the home of James Herriot – Paul says that he ‘didn’t have much of a childhood’, spending most of his time caring for his mother who was quite ill and struggled to get out to the shops by herself.

Despite describing himself as a ‘proper mammy’s boy’ and not getting on well with his father, Paul did follow in his footsteps and got a job at the Rowntree’s sweet factory in York, where he quickly earned enough money to save up for a deposit on a house.

“I left home when I was 18 or 19, because my father was an absolutely despicable person. I just could not live with him at all. I won’t go into details of what happened, but a lot happened.”

Paul bought his first home just down the road from his mother, so that he could still look after her. Around this time, he got his first tattoos – his name on his right arm and a swallow on his left.

This began his lifelong obsession with getting tattoos, with more recent ones often covering older ones, except for those first two, which Paul has kept. 

His body quickly became covered in ink, but by covering them in make-up, Paul still managed to keep his tattoos hidden from his mother when he went to see her. “She never knew. She’d have gone mental.”

In between his time working in the warehouse at Rowntree’s, Paul befriended local tattooists and helped them in their shops in return for tattoos.

As well as making up the needles, he would help to look after the inks, which had a habit of drying up and getting too thick after a while: “You’d have to water them down a bit, so what you’d have to do is put a little bit of mouthwash in, and shake it up, because then it’s still sterilized.”

Aged 20, Paul married his first wife, who at the time was only 16 years old. But the marriage lasted less than a year: “She wanted family straight away and I said no. So we got divorced.”

It wasn’t long before Paul met someone else, a girl in The Old World Club in York, which he had been going to since he was a teenager. “She was really nice, but she was going out with one of the doormen.

"All she did was go out with doormen. Anyway, she finished with him to go out with me, which caused a lot of trouble. But eventually we married.”

This time the marriage lasted for years, and other than having a lot of tattoos on his body, from the outside Paul seemed to be living a fairly conventional life through his twenties and into his thirties.

He was married, living in a three-bedroom bungalow, and still working at Rowntree’s: “It was good money, so I couldn’t give up that, because I’d just bought a house.

But I’d been moving round doing different jobs (within Rowntree). Then I went into the Smartie Department, making Smarties by hand. That was a hard job. Then putting the holes in Polos. Oh, I’ve done all sorts.”

However, admitting that he can be ‘a bit of a handful’, Paul’s marriage eventually turned sour, and after separating from his wife, he went to live in Greece, where he says he met and married another woman, despite not being divorced from his second wife.

“We lived together (in Greece) for a long time, but she liked to drink a lot for her breakfast. Then I knew I had to come back home, to do the divorce. But I couldn’t fetch the other wife home, so I had to do a runner.”

Paul began travelling a lot, to the Middle East, to Thailand and around Europe. It was in Benidorm that he got his first tattoo on his face.

“Getting them on your face is a hard decision. You have to know what you want.” Paul got a small tattoo on the side of his left eyebrow, which has since disappeared beneath more recent ink.

Paul married for a fourth time and moved to Leeds. But eventually this marriage too broke down, and as he and his wife went through the divorce, he decided to move to Blackpool, where he had lots of friends in the tattoo industry.

In Blackpool, Paul began getting more face tattoos and piercings, sometimes in return for doing promotional work for the tattooists which saw him featured in magazines and on television.

“‘Then you know, things just got a bit… I got a bit bored with it all. So I just packed it all up, and just cleared off abroad.”

What Paul later explains, is that this was when he first attempted to take his own life.

“The solicitors were charging me £194 an hour and it went on for seven months and it just broke me, just ruined everything. It got that bad, I had to sell my clothes and my furniture just to pay for the solicitor. And I was living on virtually nothing.”

These crippling costs, along with the death of his mother and then getting robbed, finally broke Paul. He took a knife to his stomach and cut it open, nine inches, from the bottom of his ribs, through his belly button and down to his waist.

“I ripped half of my stomach out and lost a lot of my bladder. I actually died twice.    I was in casualty, I died, and I could actually see them working on me.”

Despite this happening seven years ago, Paul is still on medication for the pain in his stomach, cannot eat big meals and struggles to sleep most nights.

Paul left Blackpool, and once again went travelling through Europe, making his way through Portugal, Spain and France, before returning to England and moving to Eastbourne.

Unsettled there, Paul came to Cornwall, homeless, originally staying in St Ives, and then walking the coast up to Newquay five years ago.

Homeless on the streets of Newquay, but not wanting to beg for money, Paul discovered that his unique appearance would be the key to his survival: “I never used to beg. I used to sit out in the centre. I never had a hat on the floor and I never asked for money, but people wanted a photo of me, and I’d say yeah, if you want to make a little donation. And that’s how I lived for a long time.”

However, as someone who had worked for all of his life, Paul looked to the Job Centre to help him find work and get back on his feet. But frustrated by the system, and spiralling into a deep depression, Paul attempted suicide for a second time, stabbing himself in the stomach once again, and leaving a trail of blood as he staggered to the Job Centre.

At rock bottom, Paul went to the local newspaper, the  Newquay Voice , and asked them to issue a plea on his behalf to help him get back on his feet again.

In the article that they printed, Paul explained: “I’ve been doing odd jobs over the summer, but I have had no support at all in finding work. I went to the Job Centre, but they put me on courses which didn’t seem to have anything to do with employment and they were not very helpful.

"I don’t like going on the dole, but even when I tried you have to wait six weeks, and I can’t survive that long without money and there are all sorts of hurdles caused by not having a permanent address.

“I’m a genuine person and I refuse to steal from people so I have been living rough and getting by with help from community groups such as Soul Food and kind gifts from locals, but without any support or help I feel like I’m reaching the end of what I can take. Living on the streets is just not healthy and I know I just won’t last the winter.”

Then, talking about his recent suicide attempt, Paul is quoted as saying “I just couldn’t do it anymore. I have tried so hard to get work and get back on my feet.

"All I want is a roof over my head and some food and then I will be happy. Newquay’s community is amazing and people here are so friendly and so I’m hoping somebody will give me a chance to work, get some money and get off the streets.”

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