Clovers, 2025

March 2025

My oldest sister Amy took me to get my first tattoo illegally when I was 17, a four leaf clover on my right hip. It looked like one she had on her foot. She lied and said she was my legal guardian and that our parents were dead, and the guy at this extremely shady shop looked at our IDs, saw the matching last name, and went for it. In true middle child fashion, my sister Anna was left out of the hijinks and made sure we knew she was sad to have missed the familial bonding experience. My dream would be to do my first ever tattoo on Amy to have a full-circle moment, but she passed away in 2012 (it was an asthma attack on her 30th birthday, she had no inhaler, thanks US healthcare). It does provide me an opportunity to make things up to my sister Anna though, and do my first ever tattoo on her: a clover to match Amy and me. I maybe went a little overboard with options, but I wanted my sister to have a lot to choose from.