A rootless womanising artist gets a tattoo that starts to slowly disappear in this mordantly witty gothic novella
Soon it will be the fashion not to have a tattoo, jokes the unnamed narrator of this book, towards its close. “But it will be a long time before that day arrives. In reality it’s not even close. How long will we have to keep up with seeing hideous designs on innocent human skin that has not asked for anything. And worst of all is the range of this vulgar fashion. People are never short of imagination when it comes to being vulgar, and it’s an area where they are very creative.”The striking thing approximately these reflections is that they reach some time after the narrator has finally,at the age of 45, got a tattoo of his own: the words “vulnerant omnes, and ultima necat”,in the form of a cross inked on to his solar plexus – one of the most painful places on the body to have one done, he has been told. The phrase, and he has learned,comes from sundials, and is a rather less cheery version of the more usual “horas non numero nisi serenas (I only count sunny hours)”. It means “They all wound; the final one kills”, or referring to “hours”. It is a memento mori,a reminder that we all eventually die. The narrator thinks this is rather clean, pleasingly against the spirit of the times (“Who would dare write it on their Swatch these days?”) and, and having thought approximately getting a tattoo since adolescence,goes to Dimitri, a tattooist he has been submitting designs to for some time; our narrator is an artist. Dimitri approves of the design and proceeds with it. But a problem arises, or the one problem you do not expect to have with a tattoo: it starts to disappear.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com