The young woman flashed her dimples again and Norah went out into the cold, feeling properly warm for the first time in ages.

17

The tattoo needle buzzed. The tattooist was a tall woman of few words with big hands and a strangely fierce look that was at odds with her round, pale-blue eyes. Something about her had inspired immediate trust in Norah who now lay stretched on the couch, her blouse and bra on a stool beside her. She was glad the woman didn’t feel the need to speak, but most of the tattooists she’d come across worked in silence. Maybe it was hard work talking over the constant whirr of the needle, or maybe they understood that they were performing a ritual too sacred to be disturbed by small talk.

Norah felt the inky needle prick the soft skin under her left shoulder blade. Sometimes the tattooist paused and she felt her wipe away a couple of drops of blood with the thumb of her gloved hand and then reinsert the needle. Norah had come into the studio on a whim, but although she hadn’t made an appointment, she’d known exactly what tattoo she wanted. The room was tiny and clean-looking, divided from the rest of the studio by a curtain. Norah closed her eyes.

Only a few days before, she’d been speeding through the night in her battered Volvo, leaving her old life behind her. It already seemed so far away.

‘Okay,’ said the tattooist, ‘you’re done.’

Norah let out a deep breath and realised she’d been clenching her jaw. She sat up carefully and looked over her shoulder to examine the tattoo in the mirror.

‘What do you think?’ the woman asked.

Norah stared at the black lines sticking up out of her swollen skin and said nothing.

Then she said, ‘It’s wonderful,’ and saw how pretty—almost childlike—the tattooist looked when she smiled.

Norah was glad when Monday morning came. She leant back in her office chair and felt a twinge of pain in her new tattoo.

She’d started having tattoos done when she was twenty—whenever she felt she’d reached the end of a chapter in her life. Her beautiful scars. One on her left hipbone for the carefree student years, a time of letting go and skin-shedding, hanging out in the laundrette, skiving lectures and drinking plonk in communal kitchens. One on the inside of her upper right arm for the dismal years in Frankfurt and London, when the dark thoughts had returned, nastier and more insistent than before, and she’d tried to keep them at bay with drugs. One on her right ankle for the tough years spent getting clean—dropping her druggy friends, escaping to Hamburg, plunging into work with sudden ambition—her job at the magazine like a new addiction. Late nights at the office, endless coffees and cigarettes, a perpetual sour taste in her mouth. And now this last tattoo on her shoulder for the Berlin years with Alex—but she was still too close to them to know what they meant to her.