Life & Place · A Decembers list
The ink you've carried, and what it was for
There's the anchor you got at eighteen because your buddies were getting one too, and there's the small date on your wrist that stops you cold every time you catch it. Same skin. Different reasons.
This is where each one gets its story. The shop, the year, the person beside you — a line apiece, more when one has earned it.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Name one tattoo — the swallow, the crooked lettering, the design you almost regret — and the whole afternoon comes back: the buzz of the needle, the guy at the counter, why you were there at all.
Nobody writes down why they got the tattoo. The design is right there for anyone to see, but the reason lives only in your head — the fight you'd just had, the friend you were burying, the port you never expected to leave from. The people who love you can describe every mark on your arm and still have no idea what any of it was for. That's the part that disappears.
A whole memoir about the day you walked into a shop feels like too much, so it never gets written. But one tattoo, one line — the city, the year, the name behind the initials — is something you can set down in a few minutes. Do that for each one and you've explained your skin better than you ever could out loud, on a night when someone finally asks and you're not there to answer.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The ones that end up here
The impulsive ones
The tattoo you got on leave, or on a dare, or because the shop was open and you were twenty-two and certain. The design might be crooked or dated now, but the story of that night is worth more than the art ever was.
The ones that hold a name
A person, a date, initials tucked into a design where only you would look for them. Say who it was and why you chose to carry them on your body instead of just in memory. Note whether you still think of them the way you did the day the needle stopped.
The ones that changed meaning
The symbol that meant one thing at thirty and something quieter at sixty. Maybe you covered it, maybe you added to it, maybe you just made your peace. Write down both what it meant then and what it means when you look at it now.
Where each one was done
- On leave
- The tattoo from a Navy town or an Army base, done in a hurry before a deployment, often matching what a whole squad got that same week.
- Back home
- The one from the shop in your own town, the artist you knew by name, a design you thought about for months before you sat down.
- On a trip
- Ink from a vacation or a road trip — a beach town, a big city, a place you swore you'd remember and now half do.
- With family
- The matching piece done alongside a sibling, a spouse, or a grown child, where the story is as much theirs as yours.
- Covered up
- The tattoo you had reworked into something else, carrying two stories in one spot — the first reason and the reason you changed it.
- The first one
- Whatever you got before you knew what you were doing, the mark that started the rest and probably taught you the most.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of the marks you chose, and the reasons behind each one
Every tattoo answered a question about who you were that day. Start with the one you touch without thinking, and write down what it was for.