STV NewsNicola Sturgeon has shared her first-ever tattoo during a guest appearance at an Edinburgh Fringe show.
The former first minister guest-starred at the Women of the World (WOW) Show on George Street on Wednesday.
At the end of the event, the 54-year-old showed her new ink to the audience.
“Here’s an ambition I’ve always had that I’ve fulfilled recently,” Sturgeon said.
“I got a tattoo. When I phoned my mother to tell her, she thought I was kidding.”
Sturgeon described the wrist tattoo as an infinity symbol with an arrow on the end.
“It’s a symbol of strength,” she added. “It means something to me.”
The former SNP leader also said she was planning to write a fiction novel after her retirement from politics next year.
“I still have lots of ambition to go out and do different things.
“My biggest ambition now is to see if I’ve got, and I don’t know whether I do, the ability to write a novel.”
Although Sturgeon said her novel “may never see the light of day”, she said it would likely be some kind of political thriller.
She joked: “The problem is there are too many people I’d want to kill. There’d be a murder on every second page.”
What was the show?
WOW founder and theatre director Jude Kelly hosted The WOW Show to share personal anecdotes and discuss women, gender, and inequality in the UK and beyond.
Sturgeon shared that, as a woman in power, she was often asked in interviews when she was going to have children – or why she did not have them.
“My predecessor was a man, he didn’t have children, but to the best of my knowledge, he was never, ever asked those questions in an interview,” she said.
STV NewsOne week after Donald Trump described Sturgeon as a “terrible first minister”, she also specifically named the US President as being part of a “very, very small group of people who are hoarding too much wealth, power, and influence”.
“If you look at Donald Trump, for example, he’s a member of that tiny group,” Sturgeon said.
“It suits people like him to say to people who are struggling, ‘Well, if you’re a man, it’s because women have too many rights, or it’s because immigrants have got too many rights, or gay people have got too many rights’.
“I think we’re starting to see a bit of a backlash against those rights, and it’s being perpetrated by people who have a big vested interest in keeping society as it is.”
Sturgeon’s appearance at the Fringe is one of many she has made this year after her name was cleared in a police investigation into the SNP’s finances in March.
The criminal investigation was dropped after her estranged husband and former SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell, appeared in court charged with embezzlement of party funds.
Sturgeon also announced in March that she would not seek re-election to the Scottish Parliament in 2026.
Her memoir, titled Frankly, will be published next week.
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