chris brown tattoo

 In the spirit of full disclosure, we must begin this week with a confession. Lost in Showbiz would never pretend to be any kind of expert in what it fears we must term "body art". Tattoos and tattooing represent a foreign country to Lost in Showbiz, something that was brought home to it quite forcefully when it walked past a tattoo parlour in Brighton and noticed it was touting for business by displaying in its window what was presumably an example of its recent work: a large depiction of Harry Hill pulling a face, with which a customer had decorated his right buttock. The message seemed to be: if you're the kind of person who wants to spend the rest of their life walking around with a drawing of a primetime comedian pulling a face on your backside, we're very much your go-to guys. Not LiS's idea of a winning business pitch, but then they presumably know their market. For all LiS knows, it may be standing room only in there and a waiting list like dinner at Dabbous. Customers might be trampling each other to death in the crush to get to the counter and ask: can you do Dom Joly poking out of the top of my pants?

In 2009, when I interviewed Rihanna for the Guardian, I asked whether she might use her experiences at the hands of ex-boyfriend, Chris Brown, to help other victims of domestic violence. Brown had been sentenced some months before, for an attack which, according to police documents, involved him shoving Rihanna's head against a car window, punching her repeatedly in the face, biting her left ear and fingers, and placing her in a headlock until she began to lose consciousness. Rihanna was clear. She would like to help others, she said, but "I don't want that stamp going across my head as a victim of domestic violence. As much as I was, that's a part of my life that I want to throw away, that I never want to go through again."

I thought of that conversation, her wish not to be branded by her experiences, when looking at Chris Brown's new neck tattoo. As many have noted, it looks surprisingly like the image of Rihanna that circulated after that attack, a woman with her eyes bruised, lips split, seriously battered. Sources have told gossip website TMZ that it's not of Rihanna, but "a random woman".