Lucy felt conventional, and beige, and scrawny, and so, so out of place. ‘I was just walking by, and I saw you, and … your look is amazing,’ she babbled. ‘Did you get your tattoos done here?’ As she said it, she wondered if there was a cooler word that she should have used. Tats? Ink? Art?

‘Some,’ the woman said, giving Lucy a once-over and sneering a touch. ‘I did some of them myself, and the ones I couldn’t reach or do proper, me mate Shani did. This is my shop,’ she added.

‘Oh, this is your shop?’ Lucy echoed stupidly and perhaps … offensively? Like she was implying that she didn’t think the woman would be the sort of person to own a shop? That wasn’t what she meant at all, and she hoped it wasn’t how the woman took it. All the woman did was raise her eyebrows at Lucy, evidently waiting for her to get to the point. So, Lucy did.

‘I want one,’ she blurted. ‘I want a tattoo.’ She felt the blush spring to her cheeks.

‘Oh, you want a tattoo do you, little Betty?’ The woman sneered outright this time. ‘What do you want? A little love heart on your hip? Or how about a feather on your ankle? That’d be cute. Or, no wait, I’ve got it: you want a bird between your shoulder blades, don’t you? No! A dolphin in the small of your back; that’s it, isn’t it? It’d be, like, super nineties,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘Retro as, babe.’

Lucy really should have felt cowed by this woman’s hostility, and she was surprised that she didn’t. She was shocked, yes, but she wasn’t cowed. She could feel herself blushing, but she wasn’t blushing with shame. Rather, she was flushed with defiance and that sense of purpose, which had struck her as soon as she saw the woman and had surged back with a vengeance that fed upon everything Lucy was working through, everything she explained to Suzette this last hour: her scars, Jem, the octopuses, what those breasts had done to her, who she was—who she is.

‘I don’t want any of those things,’ Lucy said, calmly. Then she pulled her shirt up and bared her scarred chest at the contrary woman, smirking as shock slackened the sneer from the woman’s face. ‘I want a tapestry, like yours. I want octopuses. A mess of them. All over my chest.’

Without saying anything, the woman got up off her stool and walked over to Lucy. She leant forward and peered at Lucy’s chest for a moment or two, tracing her eyes over her scars. Lucy found herself gazing into the woman’s cleavage, trying to find the bees’ source, which must be nestled somewhere deep. The moment or two stretched on, and the closeness of it got to Lucy. She looked towards the ceiling and tried not to laugh. She could only imagine how the scene, neatly framed by the shop window, would appear to anyone walking along the street: Lucy’s bare back, her shirt bunched under her armpits, the woman peering intently at her exposed chest.