Body of evidence

David Beckham has a new tattoo on his torso: a 'Man of Sorrow' Jesus image commemorating his grandfather, who died in December 2009. This is the latest in a series of tattoos signifying the main relationships in Mr Beckham's life: his wife, his children, etc.

This is body art as blogging, stitching your friends and family into posterity on your flesh. It is also an incentive for his to keep in shape, to prevent tattoo stretch.

Body art has been used for other purposes, noticeably as an aide memoire for Guy Pearce's character Leonard Shelby in the Christopher Nolan film Memento.

This could be an even more devious plot device: say,

• tattooing treasure maps on to buccaneers in Pirates of the Caribbean;
• cataloguing scientific or mathematical proof on the body of an intellectual genius as a means of celebration in films like A Beautiful Mind; and
• archiving code keys for stories in the Dan Brown conspiracy thriller genre, his latest being The Lost Symbol.

In the meantime, David Beckham is well on the way to being covered in tattoos, to the extent that even he may have a threshold of skin area beyond which he will not tread.