As lockdown lifted, I commissioned another piece of body art. After an impossible year, the touch of the needle offered catharsis
There was one thing I really wanted during the lockdowns (aside from the, uh, cessation of the pandemic). I quickly stopped entertaining the idea of anything so unimaginably distant and decadent as sex, but my hunger for touch did lead me to become consumed by the thought of getting a tattoo. I also thought longingly of the brisk head massage I once received from a slightly cruel hairdresser, but it was the tattoo I kept coming back to.
By the time of the March 2020 lockdown, I counted seven tattoos, most of them small and simple doodle-like things, given by friends or at ill-advised parties in foreign countries. There is one particularly hideous rendition of a snail that was largely taken over and blurred by scar tissue after it was given to me by a very handsome and very drunk man at a squat party in Milan. It looks awful but I love it, of course, because of its origin and how it will help me to never forget that party, or the way it felt to be 26 and so stupid you let someone permanently mark your body because you fancy them a bit.
