When you are diagnosed with a ‘serious’ illness like HIV or cancer, you become a bit preoccupied with the meaning of life and start to see signs everywhere. So recently when I went to the local fake KFC for a chicken burger, I was taken aback to see that the guy serving me had the word Death tattooed on his forearm.

‘Why do you have death tattooed on your arm?’ I asked him.

‘No, it ‘s life,’ he said in a heavy foreign accent, and turned his arm over. The tattoo clearly read Life.

Now I was beginning to think my imagination was making me see things but it was a trick tattoo. It was done in a swirling gothic script cleverly designed to read two ways, Life or Death, depending on which way up you viewed it.

I wasn’t going mad then. But why would a foreigner want words tattooed on his arm in English?