November 4, 2017

The first was the blackberry.

I knew I wanted a tattoo starting sometime in 2017, and kept a running list of ideas in my notes app.

I kept an excel spreadsheet of my artist research, with columns for rate, minimum, location, style, and what month they were booking for. I looked exclusively at women artists, most of whom I got from articles about the best women tattoo artists in Los Angeles, and some that were suggested to me on Instagram once I began following others.

I eventually landed on “blackberry cluster” as a celebration of 10 years living in California, and a nod to the wild blackberry bushes that overgrew the yard of my first house in Santa Cruz, where I would spend hours every late summer harvesting them through the thorns, canning mega-batches of jam.

Sara Lou of Incognito in Los Feliz was the artist. She’s from Australia and specializes in illustrative botanical and animal pieces in fine line black & gray or full color.

My friend Xochitl accompanied me and took photos. I brought snacks and a book by Michelle Tea to read while Sara tattooed my left ankle.

Once you get one tattoo, you tend to start daydreaming about and planning your next one.

October 25, 2019

I went back to Sara Lou two years later for an image I had seen online while looking up analemmas. An analemma is an elliptical illustration of the sun’s yearly path in the sky as seen from Earth. If you took a photo of the sun at the same time of day every day for a year and then superimposed the photos together, it would look something like this:

Because of Earth’s tilt and elliptical orbit, the figure eight isn’t symmetrical, and every latitude has a slightly different analemma.

I found a photograph of an analemma that also included the eight-year path of the planet Venus as seen from Earth. Allow me to explain the Pentagram of Venus or the Rose of Venus.

Venus and Earth have a nifty little dance they do around each other as they orbit the sun. For every eight revolutions the Earth makes, Venus makes about 13, reaching its closest distance from the earth five times during those eight Earth years.

Imagine you could observe the solar system from “above,” anchoring your gaze geocentrically so it appears that Venus and the sun are orbiting Earth, and watch this dance as the planets traced lines in space. It would look something like this, often called the Pentagram of Venus:

You can also watch this illustrative YouTube video of what that would look like. And this gif illustrates it from a heliocentric view.

Now let’s say you could stand in one spot on Earth and take a photo of Venus at the same time every day for eight years, and then superimpose them together. It would look like this:

Venus is steeped in mythology from cultures all over the world. As the planet that alternates between being “the evening star” and “the morning star,” Venus has often been represented by a goddess who dies and is reborn, like the Sumerian goddess Inanna. I wanted a tattoo that symbolized cyclical death and rebirth patterns, the journey to the underworld and the reemergence in the sky. This would be another anniversary tattoo, commemorating eight years in Los Angeles. I envisioned Venus tracing this path during my years of heartache and publishing wins and being broke and finding new friends and dumping various men and getting out of debt.

In astrology, Venus is the ruler of my birth chart. She is the goddess of art, beauty, love. I had the Venus analemma, the “sideways view” of the Pentagram of Venus, tattooed on the inner forearm of my writing hand.

October 3, 2021

When one of my best friends, Erica, visited me from Alaska, we decided to get matching tattoos. I was still recovering from a very shitty summer, and so the presence of an old friend was a balm to my psychic wounds. Michelle Tea makes a second appearance in this newsletter because years earlier, when she read my tarot cards in her Haight Ashbury apartment, she told me that I had three little birds by my side. I emailed my three close friends from my Tucson days - Erica, Ammie, and Cassalyn - and told them they were the three little birds. This was in the midst of our late ‘20s heyday of a thriving email correspondence, where we processed our professional pitfalls, developing political theory, ethical quandaries, random gossip and “various misadventures with beaus,” amassing inside jokes and strengthening our long-distance four-way friendship in the process. Thus the “Little Birds” were born.

Erica and I did a walk-in at Dark Horse in Los Feliz, and asked for “three little birds on a branch but not too much like a Live Laugh Love towel you’d get from Target.” An artist named Daniel Frye tattooed our inner right biceps, thus far the second-most-painful place I’ve been tattooed (more on that in Part 2).

Later, Erica turned the design into stickers to give to the other two Little Birds, neither of whom are inclined to get a walk-in tattoo.

By the way, have you read Erica’s book or subscribed to her newsletter?