My favourite time of the day at the moment is just before 7am.
I take a moment, before getting dressed, I look in the mirror and, more often than not, I smile.
It’s wholly and completely unlike me. I have always had a realistic sense of self.
Or rather, I've always accepted my egotistical self-disinterest as merely one of the many many facets of my shiny personality.
I've always been more intelligent than pretty. Verbose rather than beautiful.
Too short, too round*, too pale, too baby-faced.
Too prone to pedantry.
I've wielded fashion like a mask, a costume.
Camouflaging myself with the generic fashions of my friends, the black and studs of the goth, distracting people with my cleavage, wearing clothes which exposed me and hid me all at once.
But my tattoos? My tattoos are me.
I designed them, I chose them, I endured the pain of them. I adore them.
It's taken me far too long to work this out. But every so often I turn to Craig and I say I just love my tattoos. I can't keep it in!
* admittedly, the weight loss of the last two years has probably helped as well.
