The ace up my sleeve

Turns out, it's a new understanding of life

Austin Maples workspace at Enjoy Tattoos, Los Angeles

To have something up your sleeve sounds a bit devilish, doesn’t it? But it can also mean “you have an idea or plan which you have not told anyone about.”

Seemingly unrelated, several years ago I went through the extraordinarily expensive process of having the data recovered from the hard drive of our old and quite dead iMac, where the entire photographic history of my young family was trapped. In exchange for all my money I received a new external hard drive and a backup too, both theoretically with all the goods on them.

To this day I still don’t know what was recovered, if it was everything, if it was nothing. I just paid the money, crossed it off my list, and put them in a box. I had too many bombs going off all around me to check. I added a reminder to my calendar, for a theoretical future day when I would have time, interest, and patience to learn what was on those backup drives.

That is why, now three years later, I regularly come upon a calendar event that says BACKUP PLAN and I immediately think—every single time—“oh thank god I have one.” Then I remember what it actually means. Those drives. The visual history of me as a young(er) mother. Then I push the date back, yet again.

At this point I have neither a secret plan nor a backup plan, but I do have A Plan. I have two, actually. I’m excited about my tentative future plans generally speaking, the way I hope they will shake out anyway. But if I’ve learned nothing else from a marriage, a separation, a divorce, a pandemic, being this age at this time in this world it’s this—all we have is right now. That was actually all we ever had, but we used to be better at fooling ourselves into believing we had more control, that there was always a future, that plans mattered.

Now I dig into what is right in front of me, not worrying nor getting too excited about what’s to come, living—perhaps for the first time in my life—for this day and maybe next week, but that’s about it. Recently I said, “If I die tomorrow, it’s ok. There is more I want to do of course, but I’ve already done more than I ever imagined.” There is incredible peace in that.

So. My second plan, my only immediate and tangible plan, is to tattoo my entire left arm, otherwise known as a sleeve. It’s funny (funny fuck you not funny ha ha) to be in this particular moment in this particular country and think about how many people do indeed have something up their sleeves and how, most of all, every woman should. A way out, a secret bank account, a ticket out of the country, an accomplish, an alibi, your own money, your own goals, no fucks left to give. Whether that’s reproductive freedom or freedom from what is deemed “good” or “how it’s supposed to be” or “right,” get some aces up those sleeves now, babes.

From Grammarist:

To have something up one’s sleeve means to figuratively have something in reserve that may be pulled out as needed. The expression to have something up one’s sleeve dates from the 1500s. In those days, sleeves were generally rather large and functioned as pockets. The term have something up one’s sleeve has been reinforced by the magician’s practice of hiding items in his sleeve in order to pull them out at surprising times.

To have an ace up one’s sleeve means to figuratively have something in reserve that will guarantee success, once employed. The term have an ace up one’s sleeve came into use in the mid-1800s, and stems from gambling card games. Particularly in poker, the ace card is the high card. Someone cheating in the game of poker might hold an ace in his sleeve in order to use it to win the game.

Hello, her eyes are UP THERE

Back to my own sleeve. A quick history: A year and a half ago I decided to leave Vermont and my children behind to go have Thanksgiving somewhere else and with someone else, those someone elses being my cousin and her boyfriend and the somewhere else being Chicago.

They have many, many tattoos and it occurred to me as I was booking my trip that perhaps it was time to get my second tattoo, more than thirty-five years after my first. It’s also when I decided to start working on a sleeve, after thinking about it on and off for years. I wanted to limit this project to my left arm, since that’s where my first tattoo was located and I am nothing if not extraordinarily bothered by visual randomness.

Speaking of visual randomness

My second tattoo felt like my first tattoo. Transactional. Copying work I had provided. In an accidental coincidence that I only realized later, my first two tattoos were logos, how tell-me-you’re-in-advertising-without-telling-me-you’re-in-advertising can one get? The first was for Fox River Paper, a company whose logo I found in a design annual and brought to a tattoo artist in LA when I was 19. The second is an illustration a friend had done years ago, that I loved the minute I saw it, that then became the logo for her design and print studio. I assumed filling up my left arm would continue to feel like those first two had felt, a service relationship, me wanting to hurry it along while planning every step, knowing every tattoo I’d get, having a vision, being in control.

You’d think I would’ve learned.

Instead, working on my sleeve has been an intense learning process, a metaphor for transformation and transitions. It’s become an ongoing creative collaboration, with repeat visits. It’s stoked my curiosity, heightened my respect, and exposed me to an art form I realized I never truly understood. It’s pushed me to learn more about tattoo history, too, about sailors collecting the stories of their travels, their lives, and what they missed from home, all across their bodies.

Almost ten years ago I convinced myself I would never go through with this sleeve because I’m a perfectionist surrounded in my work life by designers, a visual person in my own right who would freak the fuck out if something wasn’t exactly how I had imagined it, and worried I would make mistakes that would be permanent and on my body and I would inevitably lose my mind because of it. Plus, I was married. I lived in Vermont. What sort of crisis was I having anyway?

Turns out, it was the right kind.

When we are young, we fall under the spell of thinking if we just do everything exactly right, our lives will naturally fall into place. One perfect puzzle piece fitting into another. But we learn, as we live a little bit more, as we grow older, that this is not how life works. We can do everything right and fail. We can do everything right and make bad decisions anyway. We can do everything right and never even question exactly who it is that defined what “right” was in the first place and why we felt so compelled to adhere to it.

As I was negotiating my divorce and dating and traveling and wanting to throw things across the room at regular intervals, I didn’t expect to intimately learn the terrain of my arm, my wrist, elbow, shoulder. I didn’t know what an elbow ditch was, that tattoos on the palm of your hand don’t last, that it’s possible to be very surprised by how different locations on just one limb can feel and hurt so differently, some feeling like nothing more than pressure, others seared by pain as the needle stitched ink permanently into my skin, the blood rushing to the surface to do its healing, to protect the scene of this quite intentional crime.

As I moved and paid off debt and wondered if work would ever return and navigated mine and my (almost grown) kids’ emotions and frustrations, I learned (am still learning) about fit. As I piece this sleeve together in my head or in front of a mirror, an amateur with no ongoing expert guidance aside from these limited appointments with actual experts in other cities, I propose ideas that inevitably won’t work.

At first I didn’t know how to eye my arm with an intention of cohesiveness. I didn’t know if different styles from different artists would work and be friends or just look haphazard and dumb. I chose exactly one spot for the YESTERDAY tombstone and on it went. Its placement so prominent that I’m still shocked every time I see it. I’m still taken aback by its size and thick lines. I’ve learned to slide my hand over it at funerals because what kind of person am I? How could I have known?

I return over and over again to this question that has helped me more in the past year than any other—how can you know if no one ever taught you? I have applied this question again and again to just about every part of my life where it could remotely apply (money, parenting, self-talk, cooking, relationships) and it works and soothes, then I endeavor to learn. Maybe I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Maybe that tombstone would be right where it is now. But guess what, just like you can’t go backwards through life and move shit around into a more pleasing order, you sure as hell can’t change your mind about tattoo placement once that baby is on there.

I got my third tattoo at a massive party at my former ad agency, because it was free. I went with my second choice. That’s when I learned a) don’t get tattoos at a party just because they’re free, b) certainly don’t get a tattoo at a party especially after at least 5 drinks, and c) don’t ever, ever, ever go with your second choice, you dumb bitch, ever.