Lucy told me she’d had a stroke last year, “something you wouldn’t be able to know by looking at me. I got the tattoo of a brain partly as an act of defiance against this crazy event which had made my foot and fingertips on my left hand side numb, and partly so I had some kind of visible mark that I was in control of my body again and that I was proud of surviving something horrendous and traumatic.”

But it was Deborah’s story I really related to. “I got a tattoo on my back when I was 20 years old. I was having two or three full panic attacks a week and could barely leave the house. At a really young age I had been sexually abused and never treated for the trauma it caused. This left me with areas of my body where I could not be touched without violent and disgusted reactions. Getting a tattoo – particularly a silly one that only meant something because I liked it – was like reclaiming my territory.”

Like me, she finds joy in the silliness of her tattoo, even though – or perhaps especially because – it was created to address horrifying trauma. This is how I feel too about my frivolous, sometimes poorly executed, yet beloved tattoos: the pig I got the week I moved to London, the snail I got from a drunk Danish man at a rave in Milan, the stick-and-poke from a lovely friend last month, and the tooth.

“How getting tattoos helped me overcome my destructive perception of my body”