Tattoo parlours up and down the country must be fearing the worst if the craze that has gripped AFC Wimbledon gets copied up and down the country.

Before David Beckham made body art fashionable, you could count the number of inked footballers on one hand – generally the sort of player you would not mess with such as Stuart Pearce or Vinnie Jones.

Their combined total is now eclipsed on the average footballer’s arm. Whereas it used to be a question of a short or long-sleeved shirt, now it’s a short or long-sleeved tattoo.

I know which side I would be nailing my colours to if you had a match-up between the country’s best players on either side of the divide.

True, the likes of Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and John Terry have yet to succumb, but in football, sporting a tattoo is definitely no barrier to career progression – indeed going under the needle seems to be some kind of rite of passage for the young footballer.

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Resisted: Frank Lampard is one of the few professional footballers not to be covered in ink    Picture: Galvineyes / Mark Greenwood

You suspect that Wimbledon manager Neal Ardley would be towards the back of the queue of those heading for that kind of parlour – although in the week that 75-year-old David Dimbleby showed off his new tattoo, it is hard to know where you can draw the line.

Ardley, though, has a new phenomenon on his hands at Kingsmeadow. The growth of the, er, growth.

The Dons may have crashed out of the FA Cup at the hands of Coventry last Friday having dominated for much of the game, but the Sky Blues were no match for the bushy beards Wimbledon had to offer – Rhys Weston and most memorably Callum Kennedy leading the way.

The former Swindon defender, at the age of 24, already has nearly as much blue on his forearms as there is in a Dons shirt.

Even that pales into insignificance with the facial hair, which looked like he had a cat sleeping under his chin.

It’s little surprise that Ardley was bemused, but the modern manager knows that, where footballers’ fashion is concerned, he just has to take it on the chin.