“Yes,” I say, cutting across this male bonding. It seems to me, unhinged by shock, that this might have been the better option. “It’s not as if I came home and said I’d got someone pregnant.” “It’s just a tattoo,” he says, when the silence goes on so long that we have nearly fallen over the edge of it into a pit of black nothingness.
£150? I think, briefly, of all the things I could buy with £150. In the silence, he says, “I didn’t think you’d be this upset.”Īfter a while, he says, “It wasn’t just a drunken whim.
“On my arm,” he says, and touches his bicep through his shirt. Maybe during his school years he thought a tattoo would balance the geeky glory of academic achievement.
Any minute he’s going to laugh and say, “You should see your faces” because this has been a running joke for years, this idea of getting a tattoo – the hard man act, iron muscles, shaved head, Jason Statham, Ross Kemp.
