Daniel left the next day. On the threshold, he gave me a look that usually meant “I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear” and chewed on his lip for like eight thousand years before finally speaking.

“You know how every love story has its thing—its impediment? Romeo and Juliet come from warring families. Ethan Frome and Mattie are on the edge of being together and then they get into a catastrophic sledding accident. Lancelot and Guinevere can’t be together because it would destroy the empire. Hell, Mr. Rochester can’t be with Jane Eyre because he has locked his tormented, possibly syphilitic wife in the damn attic. It’s all very drama-drama, you know?”

I snorted a laugh. “I’ve never actually read any of the books you’re referencing—though obviously I saw the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet—but okay.”

“Right. But most of the time the shit that keeps people apart isn’t quite that dramatic. It’s just as real though. All the stuff you’ve said about you and Christopher…like, if I do a thing where I extract the main idea that underlies everything you’ve said—”

“Wow, you mean you wrapped my Chanukah present in worksheets to develop a thesis for my paper and now I get to hear the thesis of my relationship problems too?”

“Yes. And you should feel lucky because my students pay, like, some horrifying number of thousands of dollars a year to have me sort through all their bullshit and extract an idea. Well, probably their parents do.”

I waved him on. “Yeah, yeah, extract away.”

He glared at me. “Okay, then. It’s pretty fucking simple. You’re scared because you feel like in order to be with Christopher, you have to give things up. Like, your art, your time, maybe some autonomy. You feel like eventually it’s gonna come down to a choice between Christopher and your self. But…what if that’s just not true? Or what if the stuff you have to give up is small—way smaller than what you’ll gain?”

I stared intently at the scuffed-up toes of Daniel’s boots, as familiar in my shop as my own. But he’d changed. Love had…loosened something in him. Eased something that I hadn’t even known was there.

“Maybe,” he continued, his voice small and a little hopeful. “Maybe for some people love isn’t a result. Maybe it’s a choice. I don’t know. I think for me, it just caught up to me? It was like I had been running away from something in a nightmare but then suddenly it was there, on me, the way things move in dreams. But maybe for you and Christopher it’s more like…it’s already there—a river running between you, and you can choose whether or not you step into it.”

He huffed out a breath and ran a hand through his messy hair, and when he looked up again, he looked mortified.

“Fuck, don’t listen to me. Jesus, I sound like a fuckin’ idiot.”

Then he hugged me tight, and left.

The thing was, while he did kind of sound like an idiot, he was right that I felt this bone-deep resistance to compromising any of the things I’d worked so hard for. I was afraid that if I lost my grasp on one inch of the territory I’d staked out for myself, I’d suddenly find myself with nothing.

He was also right about how damn much I liked Christopher. Christopher had gotten so far under my fucking skin without me fully noticing it, and now that he was there he was indispensable. Like his roots had worked their way deep into the ground, anchoring him there. And I…I liked it.

Now that I knew Eddie Sparks was a misogynist and a sexual harasser, there was no way in hell I was going to condone him by passively allowing him to frame me how he wanted. And definitely no way I was going make it look like I stood against Etta Blake.

Because fuck Eddie Sparks. Fuck him for using me and my art and my gender as weapons against someone. Fuck him for making it seem like I stood in opposition to someone I really respected. Fuck him for making me think he cared about my work when he really just cared that I had a vagina and that made me a tool for him to use.

I wasn’t going to play by his rules because there was no way I could ever win by them.

Nope, I was going to turn the shitty situation Eddie Sparks had implicated me in into something positive and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

I talked it out with M&M and Faron while we tattooed. Marcus was calmly furious, and practical: what effect would this have on the business, and were we ready to accept it. We were. Morgan ranted and swore, much as I had, which was supremely satisfying, and agreed that Eddie Sparks needed to be set on fire. Faron listened to everything intently and in near silence, his expressions eloquent with a combination of anger and exhaustion that I hadn’t seen in him before. But his support was clear, as was Phee’s, when he came in a few hours later.

So, with Morgan’s help, I spread the word about what I was planning to do on every online and social media platform I could, and responses started rolling in faster than I expected. The irony was not lost on me that Eddie Sparks’s promo had gotten me the platform I was now going to use to combat his douchebaggery.

I replied to Etta Blake, so nervous that my fingers slipped on the keys with sweat:

Dear Etta,

I can’t start this email any other way than telling you how much I admire your work and…well, you, really. I’ve been a huge fan for a long time now, and while I’m sorry it had to happen under such shithead circumstances, I’m pretty psyched to be in touch with you.

So. #1. Eddie Sparks is the worst. I’m so sorry to hear about what happened to your apprentice and I’m pissed as hell that ES leveraged me as any part of it. I hope you’ll pass that on to your apprentice too.

#2. Like you said, I’m exhaustingly familiar with the garbage politics in the industry and I try to do everything I can to fight against them, so if you are ever looking for an ally, I’m here.

#3. To that end, I’m going to start a—campaign, I guess the kids are calling them? A *thing* on social media, anyway. I hate that ES *bestowed* words like “badass” and “legit” on me like they were a gift he was in possession of and got to hand out as he saw fit. Like he gets to decide which of us the industry has room for.

Problems in the industry are about more than gender, but that’s the shit he’s throwing right now, so that’s what I want to focus on. It’s going to be about the ways women use tattoos and tattooing to support each other, to make space for each other, to help one another thrive in a world that constantly fucks with us.

I’m sure you know a ton of people who might be interested—if you’re into it, maybe spread the word? People can email me at this address, or I’m about to set up an Instagram and Twitter for it (links to follow)… I’ll, uh, teach myself what this whole Snapchat business is ;)

Finally, I so appreciate you getting in touch with me directly. I was really confused by the whole thing and, since SM isn’t exactly my forte, I might’ve gone on for a *long* time never sure what the hell was going on. Now that I know, I hope we can stand together.

More soon! <3 GH

Then I sent a text to Lindsey: Dude, I know it’s your day off so you guys might have plans, but I wanna hire your kid to do some social media stuff for me—it cool if I ask her?

She sent back: Yes plz take her away from me for the love of god & don’t believe her for one sec if she tells u to pay her $!$!$!

I had no clue what the going rate was for social media counterdirtbaggery, but I replied, SEND HER OVER!

Four hours later, Tara and I (fine, mostly Tara) had set everything up, complete with hashtags and a logo. I made Tara an admin on everything so that she could vet posts as they came through. She seemed to know everything about social media and was one hundred percent behind the message of the campaign. I was proud of her, really. I’d known her since she was eight years old, and I felt like I was seeing her as a kind of adult for the first time.

“You ready to launch?” Tara asked.

Everyone fell silent, even the buzz of Phee’s tattoo machine cutting out.

“Oh shit, just like that?”

“Yup.”

I looked around at everyone, and they all nodded at me. We gathered around the desk and looked at the computer where Tara was doing her thing. “Okay, fire at will.”

“Right,” she said, after clicking around among a bunch of tabs. “We’re live.”

“Cheers, kid! Thanks.”

The campaign was simple. In the tattoo industry, as in so many, women were pitted against one another, as if the way to win a place at the table was to knock one another out. So the campaign was about women having each other’s backs. I was very clear in the language of the campaign that part of having each other’s backs was about including everyone who identified as a woman.

It was about celebrating those connections and lifting each other up, rather than division and tearing each other down. Pictures of tattoos that took words like “badass” and “legit” out of the mouth of an industry that used them as macho designations, and used them to describe a meaningful connection among women instead. That insisted there was enough space for all of us, and we didn’t need to fight for it. I called it United Ink.

I was under no delusion that a social media campaign was a magic bullet solution to sexism and misogyny in the tattoo industry, any more than I thought getting a tattoo to engage with something difficult in your life was an easy fix. Nope. Both were gestures—ways to stop feeling ineffectual, ways of connecting with others who’d shared similar experiences, ways to reframe something negative or scary and make it something you had ownership over. A reclamation. An engagement on our own terms.

This was an internet response to an internet provocation.

I had started off the campaign with two tattoos I’d done last year. The first was for Carmen Montez, a woman I’d known for years. When she came out as trans, her family had been fiercely supportive. The first person she’d told was her grandmother, who she was very close to. Carmen had come in for a tattoo of a thorny rose on her shoulder. It was a tattoo that her grandmother had gotten (much to the scandal of her family at the time) and Carmen wanted to honor the matriarch of the family. Her sister had come in with her and, on a whim, gotten the tattoo also. The next day, Carmen had come back in with her other sister and her mom, and they’d gotten the tattoo as well.

I’d taken a picture of the four of them, arms around each other’s waists, grinning as they looked back at my camera, roses on their shoulders. I wrote: The family that tats together stays together! Three generations of Montezes supporting each other through thorns and blooms. #legit #badass #UnitedInk.

The second was for Sally, a woman about my age who’d had her lower arm amputated as the result of a crush injury she’d sustained pulling her friend out of a car after they’d gotten in a crash. Above the line of where her prosthetic fit, she’d gotten a simple tattoo of half of one of those best friends necklaces that were popular when we were kids, the heart cut in half and strung on a chain. The friend she’d rescued had gotten the other half tattooed in the same place. The picture I posted showed both halves of the heart.

When I’d emailed Sally, she’d given me permission to use it immediately, and said she’d spread the word.

On the picture, I wrote, Sally saved her friend Martha after a car accident. Now *that’s* #legit #badass! Life is full of DRAMA we can’t control, but we can choose how we respond to it. #UnitedInk.

Over the next hour, we were all glued to the computer screen, watching the response to my first post, and watching other posts and reposts, and emails start trickling in.

“Oh my god,” Tara muttered as I came back from talking with a customer. “Uh, yeah, something in my eye.” She pushed back from the counter and headed for the bathroom.

I looked at the post she’d just approved, and Marcus looked over my shoulder.

The picture was posted by @ThirdBaseThirdGrade, and it was of a woman in khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt, showing off a tattoo of a softball and bat on her calf. The text read:

I played softball in college and it gave me the best friends of my life and taught me about determination and pushing myself. When I started teaching third grade at a girls’ elementary school in a small town in Pennsylvania, there were no sports teams for girls in town. So I started a softball team at my school, the Tigers. At first there was a lot of pushback. But now we’ve been playing for six years, and it’s the best part of some of my girls’ days. They’ve learned to believe they can do things they didn’t think they could. They’ve learned they’re strong! This year, one of the girls from the year I started the team became the captain of her high school softball team. #legit #badass #EmpoweringGirlsThroughSports #UnitedInk

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ on a cross.” I blinked away the sudden moisture in my eyes, and Marcus wheeled away toward his station, wiping at his eyes and clearing his throat as Tara slid back into the chair. She took one look at us and nodded, rolling her eyes. “Oh, man,” I said. “There’s just no way not to turn a social media campaign into sentiment porn, is there?”

Tara shrugged. “When people see someone expressing, like, raw emotion, they feel like they can too. Like, if that’s what the campaign is about then that’s what it’s about, so why not? It’s like an assignment. You’re supposed to. And it’s to strangers, so you don’t have to bullshit. You can just…be.”

“Hunh. Amen to that, kid. Let me buy you a drink to say thanks.”

“Sounds good. Then you can also pay me to say thanks even more.” She grinned at me and batted her lashes angelically.

I laughed. “You got it, babe.”

I waved goodbye, and everyone seemed dazed. I knew they’d be watching the computer out of the corners of their eyes as they were working. I hooked my arm through Tara’s to take her to Tattooed Mom. I had a feeling she and Turner would get along.

“Dude, you can’t bring a kid into a bar! No offense, hon,” Turner said to Tara.

Tara pointed at Turner’s belly and said, “You’ve got one.”

Turner cracked up.

“Wait, even if she’s clearly not drinking? Is that a law?”

Turner shook her head at me. “Did you think the people sitting there checking IDs just had nothing better to do every night?”

“No, but sure, if there’s a chance an underage person might drink, then I get it. But she’s a child! And she’s with me!”

Tara and Turner exchanged an eye roll that confirmed my suspicion they’d get along.

“Just buy me a damn milkshake instead,” Tara said, pointing across the street.

“Watch your damn mouth,” I said, “or your mother will have me killed.”

Tara waved at Turner and pulled me outside.

Tara and I settled into a booth, and were immediately bent over her phone, watching the internet and feeling satisfied with ourselves as we ate chunks of Oreo cookie out of our milkshakes. A group of women from New Zealand who ran ultramarathons and had tattooed Xs on their ankles for every hundred miles they’d run together. Sisters with matching tattoos of vines along the scars from their mastectomies, that bloomed into roses on their shoulders. Tattoos marking the loss of mothers and friends. Two women dressed to the nines, flashing tattoos that said Femme Power on their forearms, surrounded by a scattering of diamonds and fangs.

Tattooed reminders of strength, resilience, autonomy, togetherness. Of hope. It was everything I could’ve imagined, and as the posts and shares kept rolling in I felt the kind of satisfaction that comes from figuring out a tricky tattoo problem—finding the right angle to show depth in a curve of the body, envisioning precisely the lines needed for the perfect cover-up. I could see the evidence of my efforts, and it filled me with relief.

“So this guy, Eddie. Kind of a slimeball, huh?” Tara said once we’d high-fived over the campaign.

I nodded, not sure if I should tell her about how he sexually harassed women too. I thought maybe she was too young? Who the hell knew. “Yup, total slimeball,” was all I said.

“It happens at school too, you know? The, like, pressure to be better than other girls?”

I felt the familiar combination of rage and heartbreak wash over me as I imagined Tara—spunky, smart, confident Tara—subjected to the pressures of that shit at school, at thirteen. And then in the world, for the rest of her life. “Yeah, I remember. Do you…is it hard for you?”

She shrugged. “It’s like…I didn’t notice it was that, you know? But if a girl dresses weird—or even just another girl thinks she doesn’t look good—then they’re super down on her. But then, if a girl is really pretty or dresses great, they’re down on her too. Like you lose either way, I guess? I don’t know, it’s not my friends, cuz I don’t hang out with losers. But…”

She bit her lip and I forced myself to let her finish.

“I guess it does kinda happen cuz there’s this one guy, Francis. And I’m really good friends with him but then my friend Angela’s friends with him too. And it’s totally fine. But then at lunch sometimes people will say like, ‘Oh, Angela, are you gonna fight for Francis’ or whatever. Like Francis can only be friends with one of us or something. It’s stupid.”

“It is,” I confirmed.

“I get…” She started biting her thumbnail. “Like, super angry about it sometimes. Well, about lots of stuff, I guess.”

“I hear that,” I said. “I’ve always gotten really angry too.”

And oh, man, was that an understatement. I used to feel so furious I couldn’t control it. It used to be that when I got that furious—which used to be about five times a day—I’d hit things. Punch the wall, punch a desk, slam my hand into the doorframe. Anything to act as a kind of pressure valve to let it out. Thing was, as someone whose livelihood depended on my hands being in good working order, punching hadn’t really been a good option for me.

I’d tried pinching myself, which worked for a year or so, though I was covered in deep violet bruises all the time. I’d tried squeezing my eyes and teeth shut and ended up with a cracked molar and probably a few wrinkles I’d see any year now. I’d tried furious gum chewing, but it’d just given me gas. I’d even tried a razor blade, but nothing about the clean, controlled drag of the blade and the line of hot pain it left behind matched the roiling fury I had inside. I’d tried rubber band snapping, doing multiplication in my head, reciting calming words, humming. I’d tried exercise to tire myself out but it wasn’t immediate enough. I’d tried meditation. Yeah, fuck that.

Fortunately, my anger had eased off a few years ago to bearable levels. Now I could mostly breathe through it. And when I couldn’t, screaming into a nearby piece of furniture usually worked pretty well. Sometimes I screamed so loud it left my throat raw and metallic-tasting for days and my voice rough. But it didn’t hurt my hands, so it was a-ok.

I said, “It’s hard, right? Because we’re kind of taught that boys get mad, and fight and stuff, but people think it’s not okay for girls.”

She nodded. “Does it go away when you’re a grown-up?”

I wished with all my heart that I could say yes. That I could assure Tara she only had to feel it for a few more years. But all I could do was hope she would find her own way to deal with it.

“No,” I said. “Not really. But you learn how to manage it, ya know? You learn how to turn the anger, or the self-consciousness, or the fear into something you can use. You take it all, and you put it into your art, or your sports, or your family and friends, or into trying to change things for the better. You have to, or you drown in it.”