I never listened to Black Sabbath growing up – this is why I got an Ozzy Osbourne tattoo the day after he died

I was embarrassingly old when I realised that Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t one of those celebrities who was just famous for the sake of being famous. I was born in 1996, and the Double-O’s reality show The Osbournes dominated discourse from 2002 to 2005 and beyond. I was too young to watch it as it aired, but I still caught clips and heard chatter about his unhinged antics as they made it into everyone else’s living rooms.

Not one of those whispers or snippets ever connected the dots for me. Never was it explained that that guy was the man who helped pioneer heavy metal while fronting Black Sabbath. For the longest time, that was just who Ozzy Osbourne was: MTV’s one-man swear jar.

I was 15 when I found out about the ‘other side’ of the Prince Of Darkness, thanks to a passing glimpse of a Black Sabbath concert poster, but even then it would be another five or so years before I actively listened to his band. I was an angry kid desperate for an outlet, and the full-throttle rage of Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth was more immediate and cathartic than the slower, sludgier Sabbath.

It would be disingenuous to call Ozzy Osbourne a profound and early influence. But, like thousands and thousands of others, upon hearing about his death last week I felt a dreadful sense of emptiness. By that point I knew all about his impact: how his vocals, Tony Iommi’s riffs, Bill Ward’s drumming and Geezer Butler’s bass thumping and lyric-writing laid the template for heavy metal. How his band’s themes and melodies were echoed by everyone from Metallica to Green Lung. And how the frontman was, against the odds presented by his addictions, able to repeatedly reinvent himself and remain on the frontlines of the genre he started.

Long story short: the older I got, the more I realised, Ozzy is an essential building block in the DNA of every metalhead. Regardless of if you actually like Sabbath or his solo music, chances are that your favourite band had their world changed by it. Either that, or your favourite band’s favourite band had their world changed by it.

And it’s not just metal, either. Whether it was through The Osbournes, or the many legendary stories of his inebriated mishaps or the way that such songs as Iron Man and Crazy Train permeated pop-culture, Ozzy was one of few metal figures who became a mainstream superstar. He was omnipresent in films, TV, adverts and videogames from the 90s onwards – a household name who gave a face to heavy music for those who knew nothing else about it.

Although I understood all of this by the time Ozzy passed – and frequently stuck on such albums as Black Sabbath, Vol. 4 and No More Tears – the minutes and hours after the news broke still blew me away. It felt like all of my friends, metal fans and otherwise, were paying tribute on social media. Meanwhile, statements of gratitude came not just from the usual suspects, but from PETA, the Alamo Cenotaph that Ozzy peed on in 1982, and Kermit the fucking Frog. If social media is indeed the ‘online town square’ that it was once envisioned as, then this square had a mountain of flowers on it and thank-you notes in every language.

By pure coincidence, I was booked in to get a tattoo on the morning after Ozzy died, and when I walked into the shop the reverence was still everywhere. I opened the door to hear that my artist had stuck the Paranoid album on.

As I got needled with the design I actually showed up to get, we spent the entire time talking about how Ozzy and Sabbath changed the game: how four working-class Brummies turned their amplifiers and distortion knobs up loud enough for the entire universe to take notice. We discussed how Ozzy played his last show with the band, Back To The Beginning, in their hometown just 17 days before he died. From the start to the end, he was all-caps METAL, and the idea of such a constant survivor no longer being around was… inconceivable. It still is.

Swept up with all the emotion and tributes of the past 12 hours, I asked my artist if she had the time for one more design. The two of us quickly came up with something simple: a small, black, flying bat. The question over whether or not it should still have its head was quickly answered. “Yes, it should.”

Even though Ozzy isn’t a symbol of my childhood or even my adolescence, I can’t deny that he’s an essential part of my personality. After all, he shaped and inspired practically every band that I listened to as I discovered metal. And now, metal is my job, so where would I be without Ozzy? I don’t want to think about it, but I love knowing that now I have a visual representation for the fact that the Prince Of Darkness has been with me for a long, long time – even if I didn’t know it for the first few years.