Whether it was growing up in a house where tattoos had become de rigour, or just an obsession with stick on body art that went a step further than the norm, by the time I’d reached the legal age for tattooing I was already in the parlour counting up loyalty stamps.

Of course, I built up a small collection of tattoos which now serve as little more than an amusingly permanent reminder of how much my teenage-self liked colourful butterflies and flowers.

But then tragedy struck, and for me body art has served a far more symbolic purpose ever since.

In 2006 at just 45 years old, my beautifully tattooed mother died.

The more detailed whys and wherefores are probably for another story altogether, but the sum of it is that cancer took her away incredibly suddenly, and at nineteen I was bereft, with no real outlet for my grief.

Several weeks after the funeral took place, when the shock had started to fade away and real thoughts and feelings, raw as they were, slowly began to filter back in, I had a yearning to do something meaningful.

Something that was both symbolic, and yet also relatively private.

I didn’t know what exactly, but something.

It soon came to me that a tattoo was the only thing.

My mum had discovered the joys of body art in her late thirties, and had thereafter gone hell for leather in a bid to make up for lost time.

From delicately entwined flower bands to more questionable pink unicorns (none of us have ever really understood that one), they decorated the lengths of her arms and fell sporadically elsewhere.

I’d always had a favourite; a golden yellow orchid that spread over her forearm.

The story behind my tattoo: a symbol of someone I loved very much