t is December of 2015, and I am sitting sheepishly in the waiting room of a tattoo parlour somewhere south of Stockholm. A man, who speaks hurriedly in a language I don’t understand, wraps his machine in cling film. He then marks my skin with a stencil, and before he begins, he asks me if I’m happy to start. “Yes,” I say. “I’m happy.” He smiles, and so the ceremony begins. His machine thrums loudly as he dips a tiny, metal spike into a cap of ink only to tuck the drop of colour into the fleshy fabric of my arm, where a Venus symbol – a small but obvious feminist emblem – will live forever. I am barely 21, and this is only my second tattoo. I hold my arm up in the mirror, utterly thrilled.
