MADAM – To the elderly man who was sitting in the doctors waiting room at Beeches Green one recent Wednesday.

Even though you stared at me and my children intensely for over 15 minutes while we sat opposite you in the waiting room, I still feel a deep a sense of sadness that you felt you couldn’t approach me face-to-face and ask me the question you so obviously needed to get off your chest.

Perhaps it wasn’t a question?

In fact I’ve got a feeling it was more of a statement rather than a question but being the nice and kind person that I am, I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.

So in answer to your rather loud and pressing sentence “look at all those tattoos on that girls arm...what does she think she’s teaching her children?”

Here’s a small part of my answer.

What I hope to teach my children is that different is good, strange is admirable and odd is more than fine too.

I’m happy to be part of a multi-cultural, democratic social society and I believe that being brought up in Stroud has taught me a lot about having the confidence to be an individual.

As a parent I have an endless wish list for my three children’s lives but at the top would defiantly be the important lesson of understanding equality and treating others with respect.

I would hope that I have taught them and will continue to teach them that everyone is equal.

Be it race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability or disability, appearance, size, religion or wealth, my parents taught me that there is no such thing as ‘better than’, just ‘different to’.

Just because someone looks different to you, it can be well worth remembering that, as humans, we all have the same heart beating inside of us.

In most people I know of, those hearts still do the same job and still feel the same pains when being misjudged.

My children, particularly my eight-year-old little girl was quite upset by your comment.

“Mummy,” she said. “Why was that man being horrible about you?”

Had I been with my 14-year-old son, would he have felt the wrath of your tongue for telling an old person not to be so rude to his mum?

I can only imagine what your reaction would have been to ‘the youth of today’.

As a man of your generation I’m sure you’re extremely proud to have played some part in the Second World War and all of the freedoms that, in the end, it brought.

We have you and all of your peers to thank for freeing us from one person’s fascistic, and overbearing thoughts and ideals of what perfect people should be like.

Yes I have a fair few tattoos, yes they are on my arms and yes I’m female.

But I love art, and to me my tattoos are art.

They make me happy every time I look at them and each one has a special meaning to it.

Of course you are totally entitled to your own opinion, as we all are, but please, please do think before you speak.

Words can be hurtful and painful ones tend to stick around.

So to conclude, I really hope the next time you might see something on someone’s body that you may not agree with or understand the reasons behind, please do keep your unmindful thoughts to yourself.

Either that or try to start up a conversation with that person.

Sometimes finding out why people choose to make certain decisions can open your mind to another point of view.

There is always two sides to a story and I tend to find other people’s points of view can bring into play reasons for actions that I’d never even thought of.

After all, I wouldn’t want to hold you responsible for crushing my little girls idea that her clever, kind and beautiful mummy is “amazing...just the way she is.”

(Her words not mine).

Isabelle Gardiner King’s Stanley