A tattoo, a breakdown and learning to love myself: a first attempt at writing about mental health

A tattoo

I got a tattoo and I wanted to write about what it means to me. The tattoo is a bit naff to be honest, but I love it. I’ve got it done in my handwriting that over the years people have felt comfortable telling me looks awful. Like a doctor’s handwriting. Like a spider scrawled across the page with inky legs and diarrhoea.

The four dots are around a small scar from a skin biopsy I had testing for Crohn’s disease when I was three