Last year I switched on my iPad and joined the class of other people interested in making abstract art. Our tutor gave us the task of taking a fingerprint with paint or ink, whatever we thought might work, then using the print as a start to a piece of work.

I looked around and found a tube of ultramarine acrylic paint, squeezed out a tiny bit onto my palette and stuck my finger into the blob of blue paint. I had a piece of paper on which to put my painty finger, which I duly did. ????? That’s strange…..where are the whorls and peaks of my fingerprint? It was just a smudge of paint!

So, I cleaned off my finger, added a tiny bit of water to the ultramarine paint blob, used a no. 10 round brush to thin down the blob. Now, I had a thin square of ultramarine. I touched my finger to the square of paint and tried again. Still no whorls!

I looked carefully at my fingers. I could vaguely see some of the lines that make up my fingerprint but there were other lines crisscrossing them.

Who knew that in old age one’s fingerprints wear down so much that they are almost invisible? It took until I was in my 80s to know this.

I wonder when my prints became so flat. Does it matter in the scheme of things? Not unless I turn to a life of crime in my 80s! (And I’m not gonna do that!)