FILM and literature are stuffed full of prophecies about mankind’s future – everything from dystopian societies (HG Wells’ Time Machine) to good old fashioned, red neck alien invasions (Wyndham’s Day of The Triffids).

But I do wonder if the prophets of future fiction are missing a trick?

Recently, I had to go to hospital and what struck me most – apart from the abysmally poor cuisine – were the number of patients, my age, dressed in green gowns, sporting tattoos.

Indeed, in a few particular cases, I had to wonder just how the surgeon would navigate his way through all the celtic barbed wire, esoteric symbols of war and love and Man United player profiles in order to remove the appendix. Clearly, that’s why they’re paid so handsomely.

But it did make me think. Tattoos among my age group, the 50s, are relatively uncommon, so when my generation ends up on saline drips in residential homes, all shrunken and withered away, chances are bored grandchildren will at least be able to spot something crinkled and pink.

However, its seems fairly certain that those who are now in their 20s and 30s will, when nature take its pound of flesh, find themselves exhibiting bodies that are more black and blue with an occasional streak of red than anything that resembles a person.

I have no quarrel with tattoos; once they were the badge of working-class machismo while today they have evolved into earnest expressions of individuality. And that, I think, is great.

I never had the kind of body that could exhibit a tattoo – taut, tight and ‘ripped’ were, in the 1970s, expressions of a physical perfection a geeky, four-eyed swot could never dream of attaining.

However, nowadays it seems, regardless of physique, tattoos are peppered everywhere, and they’re not just emblems or visual motifs anymore but full-scale, no-holds barred ceilings of the Cistine Chapel.

And again, if that floats your boat, who cares?

What worries me though is what happens to these expansive murals once time and life has worn us down?

After all, like it or not, we all eventually shrink and shrivel, something the trustees of Leonardo Da Vinci’s great works have never had to worry about.

And what will that leave us with? Well, imagine inflated balloons, decorated expansively with colourful vistas of Oxford’s countryside... and then deflate them.

The result, obviously, is neither a statement of dissidence or a thing of beauty. Rather, it’s just a sack.

Once, many years ago, I visited a residential home, and what I remember most were the aisle upon aisle of armchairs arranged in a semi-circular fashion round the telly, heads leaning all to one side.

It’s total absence of dignity and life left me shaken.

But what I realise now is that anyone visiting a similar home in the next 50 years will no doubt encounter a scene of unimaginable colour; all blues, blacks, greens and purple, wrinkled and withered.

It’s a vision of my ‘golden years’ that frankly I’d demand was photoshopped...