DID SEAN THINK BEFORE HE INKED?
TO anyone who has braved Scottish city thoroughfares in the sunshine, the news that the NHS spends sevenfigure sums every year on tattoo removal here cannot come as a shock.
We are completely awash with the things; inked to the eyeballs and, in some cases, probably beyond.
I’d join in, of course, but life is so unpredictable. I don’t like many of the things I used to. One day I might not like what I like now.
Then there is John, 22. In his younger days he really liked swastikas – so much so he had a large one tattooed on his chest.
Now that he is older and wiser, he wonders how nice it would be to take his top off on holiday without offending everyone.
Another cautionary ‘think before you ink’ tale is that of Sean, 84, from Edinburgh. Back when he was in the Royal Navy he had ‘Scotland Forever’ tattooed on his forearm.
He never dreamed for a second that, in later life, he’d play a debonair spy called James Bond who wouldn’t be seen dead with an unsightly green smudge on his skin.
Nor, surely, could young Sean have guessed it would be Scotland only until he became rich. Thereafter it would be Marbella for a bit and then the Bahamas. THERE are few more exasperating moments than those spent watching English shopkeepers turning over Scottish banknotes in their hands as if we have handed them something we found in a toy box. They operate cash tills in Great Britain. Why does no one educate them? And how much safer the Union might have been if they had done so years ago. Alas, they did not. Now Clydesdale is giving us a new plastic fiver which feels completely different from normal £5 notes, is much smaller and does not rip. Gee. Lucky us.