Can I mount ext4 without writing the last mountpoint to the filesystem?

I have an old ext4 disk partition that I have to investigate without disturbing it. So I copied the complete partition to an image file and mounted that image file while continuing my investigation. Now while I do not write to the mounted filesystem, I do have to mount it with read/write access, because one of the programs makes assumptions on what I intend to do, and requires write access, even though I do not intend to write to it. You know the kind of 'smart' programs. Now the problem is that, when mounting an ext4 filesystem read/write, the last mount point is written into the filesystem itself, i.e. the mount command changes my image file, including file access time and file modification time. That is annoying for a lot of other reasons. I cannot find an option in [mount(8)](https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount) nor in [ext4(5)](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/ext4.5.html) to avoid this. Is there another way to mount with read/write access, without the mount command writing to the filesystem?