THE story was a sad one. The man’s wife had died at the start of the pandemic and, since then, things had only got worse. ‘What I need,’ he said, reaching across the table for another glass of Sauternes, ‘is a new one, but they’re hard to come by at my age.’ He confirmed that there’d been a candidate. They’d been to Walter Sickert at Tate, where she’d said all the right things, and the following week they’d had a successful lunch, but, a couple of days after that, the liaison derailed. ‘Took her to The Turf for dinner and all was well, but, later that evening, I discovered a bloody great tattoo of a bulldog on her thigh.’ Our fellow diners, diplomats mostly, made the sort of noise you might make if you’d just seen your parish priest naked.
The history of tattoos in Britain is long, complicated
