Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Read Online Free Page B

why a tattoo made people feel as if they belonged to something they would find hard to explain or identify, a tribe, a mindset, a new era in which social media and marketing has sucked the marrow from our individuality.
    Who was I and where did I belong?
    I had no interest in ornamenting myself and knew girls who had been inked as a dare and then regretted it. My abrupt desire to have a tattoo wasn't to show that I belonged, but to remind myself that I didn't want to belong. The tattoo would be an aide memoire, a metaphor. To quote JG Ballard, another writer who belongs on my list of greats, I was living life as a bourgeois, but was secretly an anarchist.
    My eyes ran over the designs on the wall and one of them jumped out at me like a dancer in a club picked out by a spotlight. The shape was like a dancer, a continuous swirling line a little over three centimetres wide at the base and vanishing to the point of an inverted spiral of the type calligraphers placed at the end of hand-written manuscripts.
    I sat and watched the rain until Alice and the tattooist appeared, the job done, her hand nursing her hip through her skirt.
    'Do you have time to do another?' I asked.
    Alice looked at once shocked, then pleased. She wasn't alone. The tattooist was a Rastafarian, with dreadlocks down to his waist and the face of a saint. He smiled his laser-whitened teeth.
    'I am so happy, and it will make you happy,' he said. 'You have chosen?'
    'That one,' I said, pointing.
    'Bit small,' Alice remarked.
    'Small is beautiful,' I responded.
    We went through to the clinic. I laid on a leather-topped massage bench, lifted my hair above my head and indicated the back on my neck at the point immediately below the hairline.
    'There,' I said.
    'No one will see it.'
    'Yes, I know.'
    'You won't be able to see it.'
    'But it will be there.'
    'You, you crazy girl...'
    'Thank you,' I said.
    Like my friends, I immediately regretted having the tattoo and it hurt for weeks. There were scabs, the skin was bright red and I laid in bed at night having imaginary discussions with my mother about life being a journey and if you take a wrong turn you can never get back on track again.
    Then the scabs fell off, the red faded and in the three-way mirror I stared at the reflected spiral and changed my mind. I had at the time been reading a book about geishas in ancient Japan and discovered that these devotees of passion covered their bodies in heavy kimonos exposing only their hands, face and the nape of the neck, an intensely sensitive spot for women and one of those zones that can drive men into paroxysms of desire. It had not entered my mind when I had the tattoo inked into my skin that rainy day, but I had, in my first year at university, placed an extended foot on the road to the erotic.

3
    Dressing & Undressing
     
    Getting dressed is a daily battle in a war we are doomed to lose. That's why we keep buying new things. I run pictures from magazines through my mind, while I stand before the bathroom window applying Aloe Vera Gel to my arid skin, over and under my breasts, a bit small, although the stranger didn't think so. I stretch like a cat, pinch my nipples to shift the pain from my finger and smooth my palms down my sides, my legs, into the crease of my bottom.
    My gaze passes over the alchemist's stash of unguents and creams, bottles and tubes, enough make-up to repaint my apartment when smart girls know that less is more and the artifice is to appear as if you aren't wearing any at all. Except lipstick, of course. I use repairwear under my eyes, some blush to plant winter roses in sallow cheeks, and a puff of powder, all from Clinique. If you pop into Harvey Nicks at tea time, svelte blondes from Eastern Europe hand the stuff out like it's Christmas every day. The whites of my eyes are bloodshot, but the green of the pupils are bright with...with what, exactly?
    I'm not sure. No, I am sure. But not entirely sure. He'll be here in under an hour and I feel