“I’ve got a cool idea.” These words from my elder sister usually spelt disaster. “I’ll give you a tattoo. It’ll be amazing. You’ll love having a tattoo.”

I didn’t associate tattoos with amazing, but she was two years older than me, and knew a lot about the world and was persuasive in her reasoning.

“Everyone gets tattoos. It won’t be permanent, it’ll be like the henna ones we got on holiday. I’ll do a dinosaur for you. You’ll like that. I’ll do the brachiosaurus from the Disney film.”

I didn’t exactly say no, so from her pencil case she produced a bottle of Tipp-Ex.

“Tipp-Ex tattoos are the best. Oh, and don’t tell Mum about it. Keep it hidden.”

In no time at all, the work was done. Instead of an intricately drawn brachiosaurus, I was left with a formless white splodge down the side of my right shin.

Even at the height of the summer holidays I always wore trousers and a jumper (“You’re making me feel hot,” my grandparents would say, but I never knew what that meant). So my Tipp-Ex tattoo went unnoticed; and it didn’t stay for long anyway.

It got infected. A graze the colour of autumn leaves developed along the length of my leg, and it started to itch horribly. I knew you shouldn’t itch scabs but it was so infuriating I had no choice but to scratch until it was almost raw.

My sister was worried too. We had both seen a video at school about life on board the HMS Victory. There was a scarring scene of a barber hacking off a man’s leg because of an infected wound.

One day when we were walking through the fields, I asked my grandad what would happen if you got Tipp-Ex on your skin.

“I shouldn’t think it would do you much good. What you want to do is wash it off right away. Same with all sorts of things like glue and ink.”

“What if you’ve had quite a big amount of Tipp-Ex pasted on your leg for the past week. What happens then?” I nearly asked.

In the end my mum noticed me scratching like a dog with fleas. She asked me what was the matter so I showed her my graze, which thankfully was less putrid by this stage and resembled an old but worryingly large scab.

“How did you manage to get that?” she asked.

“Umm, it was at school,” I replied, thinking on my feet. “I was playing football in the playground and fell over.”

It was about ten years later that she found out the truth.

That’s me standing top-left in this class photo below taken in the year of the Tipp-Ex tattoo.