Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...

  The snowdrops photographed in The Arno have almost finished flowering already. They spiral away from the tree trunk, blurring into a more naturalistic planting style nearer to the hedge. This small urban garden in Oxton is maintained by volunteers. Nobody seems sure why it's named The Arno. Possibly it's a corruption of some old Viking word or phrase meaning "high point" or "eagles nest here" - the jury is out. Most of the garden is given over to a series of tidy beds which, when viewed overall, make a geometric version of a rose. Each bed is filled with roses. At this time of the year, the roses look like a snarl of dormant sticks. Of much greater interest to me is the cottage garden border which runs along one side of the park. This holds a variety of traditional plants such as honesty, hellebores and elephant's ears, and a host of wildflowers which have either been deliberately planted or which have have helped themselves to a patch of unmanicured e...