In a not very small, but marvellous city, I bought a whole package of temporary tattoos, ranging from hieroglyphs to mermaids. After leaving this beautiful city, I later happened in a working-class town where I bought another package with arrow-pierced hearts and thunder-struck stars.

I bought them because I was asked to. Otherwise, I am very conservative in my attitude to tattoos: I only recognize anchors.

I remembered this episode as I was browsing over an old notebook, from which one temporary mermaid suddenly fell out. Once it did, there was no stopping me. I dropped in at a tattoo shop in a run-down Parisian street, but the drawings I found there were too lumpenproletarian.

What is a foreign city to you?

Maybe it is what pierces you with its tender needles. In general, travelling is gathering of these tender piercings. And if you travel a lot, a big colourful tattoo appears inside you, in an invisible place, somewhere deep beneath you. The more you travel, the bigger this tattoo becomes, and it never begins to fade.

Real tattoos are destroyed in a myriad of ways: they are burnt or slashed with a knife, sometimes the skin is cut open and torn away. This is because tattooed old men are often irritated by the reminders of the passions of youth.

But the piercings of travel can never be rubbed out or burnt.

The magic of these tattoos is that they reveal themselves only to the sight of your eyes. As time passes by, their original shape increasingly defies recognition, for a mixture of truth and lies piles upon them, making the closet seem full of an array of majestic dresses.

The other day I bought a book by Marco Polo. My old one had disappeared somewhere and I shuffled through the new book with interest. Don’t be surprised by his narrative about Georgia. His tattoo too, kept altering. This tireless traveler assures us that the Georgian kings were born with an eagle encrusted on their shoulder. Again tattoos, and again of magic power, emerging from within and settling upon one definite place, say,  the shoulder blades. Tattoos are a powerful inspiration for thought as they are so full of magic.

I believe in Marco Polo if only because I have seen myself these magic tattoos giving one a whole new infusion of life, enlivening one’s dreams, boosting energy. They were not either of the two tattoos I saw on the arms of the two taxi drivers, one of which ran: “Youth, you are lost forever”, and the other: “Don’t trust a woman”. Those taxi-drivers were fit and fine men, bursting with health, and in the inscriptions they bore, there was something strange, comic and sad at the same time, and I have remembered them since I was a little boy.

But I will tell you of different tattoos, which I’m not sure about Marco Polo, but to Prosper Merime and Robert Louis Stevenson would be a source of great excitement.

It happened a long while ago, when I didn’t even know that the earth was round. In summer, during our holidays in a village in Imereti, my mother and I were visited by a relative from Kutaisi. He  bundled us into his old Volga and rushed us to Kutaisi for two days. My recollection of the particular region is not quite distinct. I can only remember that the yard was very old and overshadowed, the house – unusually cool, with a set of dim rooms that are so pleasant in the summer time. On the balcony of this house was seated an old, bony man with a bald-patch on his head. His features had an angry expression. His blue, narrow eyes and an aquiline profile got so firmly stuck in my mind that I can still remember him. He was called Uncle Kolia and was the father of our relative, or, he was our relative too. What came as a surprise to me was Uncle Kolia’s welcome, which was so atypical of Imereti: he rose unhurriedly, shook hands with my mother and then, as if petting me, gave me a bad smack on the side of the head. This made me sulky and a bit wary of him. Uncle Kolia didn’t eat at the dinner with us, and with very little effort at striking up a conversation, he rubbed a filter-free cigarette in his fingers and sent me for matches. The following evening we returned to the village, but before then, of course, there was a morning.

As I came out of the bedroom, Uncle Kolia was sitting on the balcony in the same accustomed place. Instead of the discoloured shirt, he was now wearing a sleeveless vest. The vest was blue and no less shabby , he has probably possessed it since Stalin’s days. He had rough, cracked and red hands. His pale, lean-fleshed arms hung loosely from his shoulders. Most important were these –  the arms. I could already make out Georgian and Russian letters, but those on his arms were different, a complex blend of signs and symbols lining the space from his shoulders down to his wrists. Most vividly I remember a fat star and a female profile. Overcome by a surge of excitement, I even poked a finger in that star and asked this sombre man:

“Is that a star?”

“Stella, stella victoria,” I tell you, I remember these words, “and this was grandma Clara… Why was… She is perhaps still called so.”

I never saw those arms again. The story of the old man was told to me by Grandmother when I was already 20.

Uncle Kolia had been captured by the enemy during the Second World War. In Northern Italy, he had worked for three years on a peasant’s farm, where he had fallen in love with the peasant’s daughter. After the war, however, he felt irresistibly homesick. Even the gloomy prospect of the Soviet camps could not stop him from returning to his home and family. He escaped the camp, but failed to brighten up his sombre mood. His wife, a quick-witted woman from Imereti, often joked that he was begrudging them the importance of his sole presence on the balcony, to which Uncle Kolia replied that he had sacrificed his life for them and left for home…

But my narrative was of the piercings somewhere deep beneath you. I think I also told you of their ability to break through to the surface. These are magic tattoos and I believe Marco Polo.

And you know why?

Uncle Kolia’s blue-mottled arms weren’t inherited from Italy. One fine day, I believe in 1956, he put two needles together and a matchstick, rolled a thread over them, got a vial of blue ink and began to carve out on his then-brawny arms the Italian verses (that they were verses I know from Grandma), the star, the profile of the beloved woman and even the vehicle in which he carried bales of hay to the farm, and also, the flag of Italy.

The tattooing of the right arm proved especially daunting. Apart from the pain,  he had gone through an agonizing ordeal when drawing with his left hand.

But he was a man who could withstand the pain.

Such is my story. And no one can convince me that tattoos are nothing more than just tattoos? What is there, underneath? You cannot deny that those magic tattoos do exist?

I recounted all this because of the old notebook, from which fell a temporary tattoo bought in one beautiful city. It was the tattoo of a mermaid.

But who cares about mermaids?