To erase what has been written – to, in effect, turn back time by wiping the slate clean. The promise of lasers to turn the skin back to a blank page. To remove a tattoo so that others have less signs to read, so they can inscribe what they will on the blank surfaces of the flesh. Or to be defiant and carry a legible scar which signifies the temporal distance between you and your former selves – the splintered sisters who practiced piano with bare arms and, later, sat in a chair and offered up the same to the needle. Such folly. Such brutal truth, to literally wear one’s past on one’s sleeve. Especially when it so flagrantly contradicts the image you are now trying to project. A skull is the most generic and tacky of tattoos. It distracts from your ethereal beauty and frustrates the designers and photographers whose job it is to ensure that you appear as an affluent princess, a doe-eyed waif, a seductive naïf, anything but a pirate’s daughter; even in these post-ironic, neo-gauche times. For what can it mean to be in the prime and life and have the emblem of death on your shoulder? What can it mean to be constantly reminded (of anything . . . mortality, bad taste, poverty)?

Nina was "discovered" sleeping on a bench in Israel, and was soon strutting down the catwalks of Paris and New York. Like most things that are introduced to the world in such terms, she was already there, merely "flagged" by an insatiable industry. Her tattoo is the symbol of the indigeneity of her self. Models are often portrayed as a kind of wonder-putty, to be moulded into any shape the season dictates. However Nina’s tattoo was always a nuisance, even in the age of Adobe Photoshop. (Which, let it be said, has done more for producing "postmodern" epistemological uncertainty than all the French philosophers combined.)

Half Chinese and half Russian, Nina is impossibly exotic, which is also why the stubborn, grinning deathshead on her arm perplexes. The contrast between the clumsily-sketched ocular cavities on her svelte shoulder and her own swirling almond-eyes is almost too much to absorb. It seems inextricably bound-up with the notions of the Fall, innocence corrupted, paradise remembered – the whole mythical litany of loss. It makes a mockery of those "tasteful" anklets of ink which encircle those slender feet which tread across the pages of the style-bibles worldwide. The Japanese calligraphy, bluebells, butterflies and para-Picasso doves.

Only two other models "shoulder" this burden, but manage to avoid the irreducible immanence of its permanence. One has a dragon curled around her skull. This is obviously spectacular in a heraldic-futuristic fashion, and thus can be easily assimilated by the Style Engine, if also easily dismissed as faddishly freaky. The other has a tattoo of a biker-chick astride a giant spanner on her arm. This obviously outdoes Nina’s in terms of sheer white-trash iconography. It also performs, however, this models much-publicized Sapphic predilections, and thus can be redeemed as another ironic comment on the class-based limits of what has increasingly become depicted as a chic lifestyle choice. Nina has neither of these options to fall back. No zeitgeist of qualified triumphant display.

At a party recently I was talking to a young Jewish man who made those gestures appropriate to suddenly remembering something you were supposed to do. "Shit," he exclaimed. "I forgot to play my grandpas numbers." These turned out to be the numbers his now house-bound grandfather plays every week in the lottery – the very same which were tattooed on his arm more than fifty years ago in Belsen. He had yet to win a cent.

A friend once informed me that he was considering getting a tattoo which said, Ramones or Nothing, just to remind him that he was young and foolish once (we were both seventeen). Youth no longer meant unscarred, but scarred with something inane. Pre-emptive nostalgia.

With her faltering English, Nina addressed the cameras: "When I first come to New York, I am, how you say, very exciting."

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