Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

‘Because your boyfriend says no. Because you still have to be a good girl,
even at twenty-seven. Because it’s too scary. C’mon, Clark. Live a little. What’s
stopping you?’
I stared down the road at the tattoo parlour frontage. The slightly grimy
window bore a large neon heart, and some framed photographs of Angelina Jolie
and Mickey Rourke.
Will’s voice broke into my calculations. ‘Okay. I will, if you will.’
I turned back to him. ‘You’d get a tattoo?’
‘If it persuaded you, just once, to climb out of your little box.’
I switched off the engine. We sat, listening to it tick its way down, the dull
murmur of the cars queuing along the road beside us.
‘It’s quite permanent.’
‘No “quite” about it.’
‘Patrick will hate it.’
‘So you keep saying.’
‘And we’ll probably get hepatitis from dirty needles. And die slow, horrible,
painful deaths.’ I turned to Will. ‘They probably wouldn’t be able to do it now.
Not actually right now.’
‘Probably not. But shall we just go and check?’
Two hours later we exited the tattoo parlour, me eighty pounds lighter and
bearing a surgical patch over my hip where the ink was still drying. Its relatively
small size, the tattoo artist said, meant that I could have it lined and coloured in
one visit, so there I was. Finished. Tattooed. Or, as Patrick would no doubt say,
scarred for life. Under that white dressing sat a fat little bumblebee, culled from
the laminated ring binder of images that the tattoo artist had handed us when we
walked in. I felt almost hysterical with excitement. I kept reaching around to
peek at it until Will told me to stop, or I was going to dislocate something.
Will had been relaxed and happy in there, oddly enough. They had not given
him a second look. They had done a few quads, they said, which explained the
ease with which they had handled him. They were surprised when Will said he
could feel the needle. Six weeks earlier they had finished inking a paraplegic
who had had trompe l’oeil bionics inked the whole way down one side of his leg.