'Tattooed muscle modelling helped me tackle PTSD'

Luke Shipman never ed the nights he was screaming in terror after a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

Comrades from the Mercian Regiment found him cowering under his bed in his full British Army combat gear.

Luke, now 37, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and eventually spent several spells as a psychiatric hospital inpatient.

After leaving the Army in 2017, he says exchanging the firing line for film and fashion shoots has helped him rebuild his life and put him in a "better head space".

Luke, from Langley Mill in Derbyshire, had his first taste of the spotlight when he entered a modelling competition for tattooed men on his 30th birthday, he said.

Now, after featuring in an comedy drama film, called Hustle and Cuss, he has set his sights on a career in acting.

"It's part-time at the moment but I'd like to earn a living from it," Luke said. "Acting is always something I've wanted to do.

"This latest film was just the luck of the draw really; my part needed to be filled because somebody fell ill.

"I decided I wanted to pursue the modelling just before my 30th birthday after I started to overcome my PTSD. I told myself - 'this is going to give me the trigger that I know I'm OK'."

Luke ed the Army straight after finishing school and was 18 when he started the first of three front-line deployments in Helmand Province in 2007.

Over years of service, Luke said several close friends and comrades died or were seriously injured while serving alongside him in the Mercian Regiment, in Afghanistan.

He said his mental health deteriorated after a Taliban soldier dropped a "cooked" grenade into a checkpoint that Luke had been standing guard at just hours earlier.

"When you saw your friends get injured, it was one of the things that would always stay with me," he said.

"One time, me and a colleague were doing a vehicle checkpoint and every two hours we'd switch.

"The [attacker] was able to sneak up, climb on the roof, cook a grenade and drop it, so they didn't get chance to move out the way.

"It was just carnage. One of my close friend's whole leg was just skin and blood.

"If they'd waited another two hours, I would have been there and the grenade would have landed right next to me.

"That kept getting in my head. I just kept thinking 'why not me? Why did it have to be the other guy":[]}