He sits closer to me now as he serenades his audience with stories of life on the road, my arm touching his skin, and when he moves against me the feeling is electrifying. His arms are so strong and warm and I close my eyes wondering what it would be like to be sitting here as his girl.

Then I open my eyes, coming back to reality, and I try to focus on one of his tattoos to see what it says. I don’t ever remember him having all those tattoos. They are marks and statements of his life after me and I want to see what they can tell me about the life he has lived since we parted.

‘Forever Joanie’, says one of them in big scrawling text down the inside of his forearm.

Joanie … yes, she’s the girl he brought to that movie premiere, the one in the magazine that Emily showed me one day in my apartment on Merrion Square. The actress, that’s right. She must have meant a lot to him if he got her name tattooed on his arm.

Wow. I got a song, she got permanent ink.

He also wears a short wrist sleeve of symbols like stars and hearts and a small American flag alongside an Irish tricolour, which I assume is representative of his family roots. A symbol of his birth sign Taurus blends into where his elbow bends, then a date which must mean something to him sits above it. Whoever tattoos his arms has certainly been busy.

The noise and chitchat around me fades like white noise in the distance and I feel like I’m reading the diary of his life just by following the inky patterns on his right arm. But then my eyes widen when I see that Joanie’s isn’t the only name on there.

Is that a ‘Michelle’? And a ‘Suzie’? Really? The figure of a scantily clad woman slithers down his bicep and underneath it says another name which I can’t quite make out. Who is she? I feel a very brief pang of jealousy and then a whack of common sense hits me in the throat. He has an armful of women, quite literally!

I burst out laughing, cover my mouth and excuse myself when both Eva and Tom glance my way. Is this what I could have been? A name scrawled as a memory or impression on his arm? Is this the modern-day equivalent of the old term ‘notches on the bedpost’?

Tom leans across and whispers into my ear.