In 1987, I failed to persuade a schoolfriend against having the logo of his favourite band tattooed on his thigh.

I reckoned his plan a poor one on two counts.

First, I was generally against tattoos. Like an Enid Blyton character, I thought them the preserve of sailors and jailbirds, not nice suburban boys like us.

My second reason for opposing my friend’s plan got into the specifics of the design.

If he really was going to permanently adorn his body with an image, I felt certain that his decision to go with the name of a flash-in-the-pan group – in this instance The Guana Batz, long forgotten figures in the blink-and-you-missed-it ‘psychobilly’ scene – was short-sighted.

As we waited in a Glasgow tattoo studio for his appointment with the needle to begin, I suggested that he think again.

You’ll regret this, I told him.

We sat in silence and I looked at the photos of the artist’s past work that covered the walls.

Morrissey, lead singer and lyrical genius of the Smiths 

Oh, I thought, looking at a full length shot of a young woman. That’s not a real bikini.

I’ve long since lost touch with that pal, so cannot confirm whether my prediction of his regret was accurate.

I can, however, confirm that my dislike of tattoos remained with me for years afterwards.

My juvenile belief that tattoos were for wrong’uns evaporated, soon enough, but I could not shake the certainty that buyer’s remorse was an inevitability.

We go through life making more than enough mistakes about all sorts of things. Why add having the name of a soon-to-be ex-partner permanently written on your arm to the list? This is an avoidable error.

By the mid-1990s, when tattoos had become more mainstream, I’d developed another reason to dislike them. Not only were they unfashionably fashionable, but a new series of clichés had emerged: I’d see waves of young people wearing identikit designs, and shake my head.

There are a lot of faded Celtic crosses out there. And a fair few dolphins, too, I’m sure.

By my mid-thirties, 20 years ago, I had fully changed my position on tattoos.

Nicola Sturgeon chose an infinity symbol for her first tattoo

Sturgeon unveiled her unusual tattoo earlier this year

I had friends who’d chosen brilliant, personal designs, and I found myself toying with the possibility that I might get inked.

But the old question remained: what could I get that I would not, at some point, regret?

Now open to the idea of getting a tattoo, I could not get over that final hurdle.

From time to time, I’d go back to the idea but, as the years passed, the idea began to grow preposterous to me. What kind of middle-aged loser gets a tattoo?