Warn every teen you can! They'll regret that tattoo... just like me: Our writer wishes she had never been inked

Regrets? I have a few. Well, three to be precise. They are shaped like a swallow, a butterfly and the most appalling daisy that grows, like a meandering weed, from the gap between the last two stubby little toes on my right foot.
It is not the best look for a fortysomething mother of two. I don’t really know what I was thinking. But about 25 years ago I went through my ‘tattoo phase’.
The swallow came first. I remember traipsing the streets of Bristol, while I was at university, trying to find a small, grubby parlour where a bloke with more tattoos than teeth scribbled something vaguely avian on my ankle.

Warning: Imogen regrets the tattoos she got in her youth

Faded: She's now embarassed of her swallow and 'appalling' daisy designs

I am not even sure why I chose a swallow. I’m sure it had tremendous significance at the time. Or perhaps I thought it looked pretty. All I remember is that this, like drinking lots of cider and flunking my first-year exams, was an act of rebellion. And it was as achingly cool as it was painful.
‘I thought you were going to go through the roof there,’ said the ‘artist’, putting down his inky needle to admire his work. I left the place high as kite on endorphins.
My mother was appalled. ‘With ankles as fat as yours, darling, why highlight them with a tattoo?’ she asked. Yet I needed more!
Back then, in the late Eighties, only the really ‘out there’ had the guts to get a daisy on their foot, a dolphin on their heel or a fluoro butterfly on their hip that changed colour under the UV lighting at raves.
At least, it did. Change colour that is. For what no one tells you about tattoos is that no matter how beautiful they look when first done, they fade and shift over time. 

Not so unique: She also has a butterfly on her bikini line but her attempt to be different has failed since many people today have tattoos

So the pretty pink flower you had when you were prancing on a podium at Pacha nightclub aged 20, or that fabulous tiger you had done in Thailand, will turn into a dull sailor-blue smudge by the time it has been rubbed in office shoes for a decade, or stretched to Calais and back by pregnancy.
When you become a not-so-yummy mummy on the school run, the presence of tattoos becomes quite mortifying.
What I also didn’t realise was how banal my poncy, posed, anarchic statement would become. It seems that every fortysomething who fancied themself a little racy, who did a spot of raving or holidayed in Ibiza in 1989, has a symbolic souvenir on their body. Half the country’s middle management has a flower on their thigh or a musical note on their wrist.
These days, tattoos are as ubiquitous as Primark. Any girl worth her lobster tan and tongue stud is covered in doodles and motifs.
And who is to blame for this? Today’s mindless, self-obsessed, misguided celebrities. There’s not a pop, rock or reality TV star who hasn’t been ‘inked’. And the more famous they get, the more tattoos they acquire. Robbie Williams, David Beckham, Russell Brand, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell are perhaps the most obvious examples of ‘super-inking’.

Not so yummy-mummy: Imogen hates her tattoos on show on the school run

Taking this dubious trend to its limits is everyone’s favourite bit of cougar-bait, One Direction star Harry Styles, who seems intent on entirely colouring himself in.
The ladies are not immune, either. Angelina Jolie is an Ordnance Survey map of international adoption, Kelly Osbourne is a sticker book and Cheryl Cole’s tattoos look like a Moss Side bus shelter. Even It Girl, Cara Delevingne, has inked a lion’s head on her finger.
I, too, thought my tattoos were the height of artistic expression. Now, whenever I’m trying to be glamorous or sophisticated, they rear their smudgy heads.
It’s the pitying look on the shop assistant’s face as she spots my poorly drawn daisy poke out from  the overpriced mule I’m trying to squeeze my foot into. 

Bad influence: Robbie Williams, left, and David Beckham are covered in tattoos

Inked: Cheryl Cole revealed her new rose tattoo when she performed with Girls Aloud earlier this year

On holiday my tattoos are equally irritating. My no-longer-neon butterfly slips out of the side of my bikini, looking like an odd-shaped bruise on my right hip. The stamps on my feet, long since turned a mouldy green, go crusty and flaky and dry. And there is always a point, just as I’m about to relax on a lounger, when some bright spark pipes up: ‘What’s the hell’s that on your ankle? Have you had some sort of terrible accident?’
To which my eight-year-old daughter will pipe up: ‘It’s one of Mummy’s rubbish tattoos.’
And she’s not wrong. They are rubbish. I have considered getting rid of them but it seems you have to go through a painful palaver only to be left with an equally ugly scar.
If only I could have predicted the future when I sat there, burning with rebellion, in that Bristol tattoo parlour. If I’d only known how boring and commonplace my ‘revolutionary’ fashion statement would turn out to be. They are everywhere, from the Prime Minister’s wife to everyone who has ever auditioned for The X Factor.

Works of art? Angelina Jolie, left, has a number of tattoos while model of the moment Cara Delevingne has one on her finger

So if, like Becks, you are tempted by a Latin verse; or, like Peaches Geldof, you fancy inking the names of former lovers up your forearms, my advice would be: don’t.
I promise you. You may not regret it in the morning but in 20 years’ time, when these follies of youth are still mocking you from your middle-aged folds and wrinkles, you will fervently wish you could turn back the clock.
Restaurant Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous is published by Bantam Press on July 18 (£12.99)

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