tattoo tales

Everywhere one looked on our island there were tattoos.

Fierce dragons thrashing a passage around the impediments of overripe midriffs; demure circlets of flowers around a young girl's upper arm, an hommage perhaps to Laura Ashley; exotic hieroglyphs highlighting the knobbly vertebrae of a youth's backbone, and all manner of curlicue and arabesque.

I bear my own relatively recent tattoo on the deltoid rump of my left arm, an elegant hum, ancient seed syllable denoting Absolute Reality - the ultimate conversation stopper. It took me over five decades to even entertain the thought of having a tattoo.

Thanks to Darren, tattoed from head to foot with more planned, I took the steps down to his mate's tattoo parlour in a basement beneath a louche hairdressers in the Hackney Road, and was pricked and pierced for half an hour, and then went home wrapped in cellophane.

I didn't feel much, having smoked, for Dutch courage, a tiny spliff in the graveyard opposite beforehand, so apprehensive was I of the imagined pain and even more of what felt like the ultimate transgression I was about to enact, a flight from polite society.

More frightening than that even was how to tell my mother!

She bore her own tattoo, the number 63565, on her left forearm for all the world to see, branded as she entered into Auschwitz in 1943. That number overshadowed my whole life (I often considered that at my mother's death I would have to surgically remove it and keep it preserved in aspic in a bottle, so precious was it. In the event I allowed it to be cremated with the rest of her, but the ashes remain in a lovely ceramic pot in my living room; I am not yet ready to release them to the Golder's Green Crematorium Garden of Remembrance, as decorum demands.)

A few months later, and with renewed Dutch courage from complimentary cocktails in a Swiss mountain hotel, I told her. Perhaps mellowed by her own unaccustomed cocktail, she hardly batted an eyelid, long resigned, too, to what she saw as my follies.

So thanks Darren, and not just for the tattoo. You were such a whizz with computers, and helped me choose and set up my first laptop. I dare say you are still tuned into cyberspace and admiring my blogging prowess from another dimension.

In your simple, direct and often disarmingly crude way, you taught me more in the few months I knew you than any number of sophisticates had, in more than a decade of spiritual searching.

What a shock it was to hear of your death the evening I returned to London from a retreat!
Worse still to see you the following morning at the morgue, unreachable behind glass as your body was still in the coroner's care, so uncertain was the cause of death. Suicide would not have surprised any of your friends, bereft as you were from the loss of Chris your soulmate a year earlier.

There was a dreadful contusion on your forehead, which in my ignorance I thought was a gunshot wound, or mark of some other shocking violence. It turned out to be nothing more than the bruise a corpse acquires when its brow is pressed against the hard wood of a bedframe for days on end. It was a long while before a troubled friend battered down your door and found you. You were 33.

Death from natural causes was eventually proclaimed. A relief, although no one quite believed it.

I led your funeral, as I had Chris' a year earlier.

His had been a baroque and whacky affair, his coffin arriving for the event in the reduced glass hearse of a motor bike sidecar, which had conveyed him from Tufnell Park to Kensal Rise, a not inconsiderable distance. You could not help but smile.

You too aspired to be a biker, Darren, but smiles were in short supply that year and for your funeral we thought a limousine was best.

Another year passed almost to the day, and I led my mother's funeral.
One of the best things I've done.
Many thanks to Rosalind for supporting me so fully through a momentous week.

Enough funerals already!