What motivates a person to permanently mark their body? What is so vital it needs expressing in such a definitive way? These two questions have fascinated me ever since I was a child, and over the years I’ve become captivated by both the art and the romance of tattooing. And so for the past 3 years I’ve been traveling around the world in search of answers, tracing the history of tattooing from the local high street studio, all the way back to its ancient roots. In a series of journeys across South East Asia, Polynesia, Europe, America and the Holy Land, I’ve been talking to both the artists and to the people they tattoo, discovering the meaning and the motive behind each design. What I have accumulated is a collection of unlikely adventure stories that burrow right to the heart of the human condition – uncovering unsettling truths about personal identity and prejudice. I’d love turn them into a book (I certainly have enough material), but for now a blog seems a sensible place for a feckless raconteur to start canvasing opinion. Patrick Mulford