My niece AF and her friend HH returned home from a shopping trip to celebrate A’s sixteenth birthday. When they confessed that they had spent the whole afternoon in a tattoo parlour on Edinburgh’s Cockburn Street we feared the worst. Our anxieties turned to horror as A slipped off her top to reveal an enormous tattoo that stretched from the base of her neckline all the way down her back. The design was a very odd abstract shape, picked out in red and gold (which would doubtless degenerate into an inky blue eyesore, we all pointed out).

For about half an hour A and H enjoyed our hysterical reaction to A’s folly. Then they admitted that the “tattoo” was, in fact, nothing more than glitter sprinkled over a square of clear sticky-backed plastic that H had temporarily positioned on A’s back.