The first one lives on my back. I was so taken with the art of Japanese tattoo, their craft and how they envelop entire bodies with such intentional beauty. My curiosity eventually led me all the way to a shop on Sunset Boulevard during my college years at UCLA, circa 1989. I don’t remember where it was exactly, but I do remember walking in that door and feeling the full electricity of a young woman exercising her freedom for the first time. I remember choosing the artwork. A beautiful Iris flower. Not because of the cliché you’d assume based on my name. That was emphatically not it. The flower, the leaves, the color. I definitely wanted the color. Bright. Boisterous. Beautiful. A rebel explosion of color on pale skin, with special attention to the purples of the petals and the green of the leaves.

I added to it not much later. A red ladybug with black spots, in the same Japanese style, placed on my lower back, above my right butt cheek, after studious research confirmed it was a spot that would not stretch, wane, or fade. Not in the sun. Not susceptible to the years. The story I was writing on my own skin to last pristine for a lifetime.

My next tattoo arrived differently and took almost four decades to appear. It didn’t come from a shop on Sunset Boulevard. It floated down from the heavens and landed on me in Mongolia, after I dropped out of a 155-mile ultramarathon. My fourth ultra, and not one I had expected to halt in that way. That experience, what it took to get there, what it cost to stop, cracked something open in me. And there it was. The eternal knot. Presenting itself in my dreams and every thought during that time in that magical, faraway country. I placed it on my inner left arm, prominently, intentionally.

This morning in the shower I glanced at it, the way I do, every single day. That’s the point of it. A reminder about the cycle of life, the cycle of habits, the cycle of choices, and hopefully a cycle of happiness if and when I can get all the others in order.

That’s when it struck me.

I placed my first work of art, that beautiful flower with such a story behind it, in a place I could never see. I put it on display for somebody else. Not able to see my own beauty, I turned my back to it. Literally. Why didn’t I place it somewhere I could enjoy its colors every single day?

It was a beauty I hadn’t seen in myself. Its location said everything about the choices of an early twenty-something who didn’t yet understand a thing about her own allure, her own glow and glimmer. She was performing. Outward-facing. Offering her loveliness to anyone looking while standing with her back to the mirror.

I know how this goes, because we all do. The old photos. The ones where we are quite clearly beautiful and had absolutely no idea. We were our own worst critics, too much this, not enough that, nowhere near the vision of wanted beauty in the magazines. We laugh about it now. We say we should go back and tell that person a few things. Enjoy it. Relish it. Flaunt it, baby.

And yes, with full awareness: future-you is already rolling her eyes at present-you, casting a dejected glance at this body and this face and wondering why you couldn’t just enjoy it while you had it. The joke is recursive. The lesson is on a loop.

Break the loop. That’s the point.

I know now that my writing, my words, are for me. Not for some imagined audience, not for approval or proof or performance, but simple: for me. It took me a long time to understand that putting words on a page was not about display. It was about seeing myself. And here is where the tattoo tells the same story: when I finally chose a mark I could see every single day, the eternal knot, inner forearm, impossible to miss, I was finally putting something beautiful somewhere it belonged.

You are beautiful. Right now. Not in the rearview mirror. Not in the version of this moment you’ll mourn in ten years. Today. Wake up. Turn around. Stop displaying yourself to a room you’re not even facing and let yourself see what’s already there.

(Morning, shower reflections. Reminder to self.)