Probably not the best question to ask a tattoo artist when he’s plunging a needle into your partner. But hey, I live with OCD and tattoos always seemed to me like a concept too permanent to just go and be spontaneous about it. In the end though, like all our scars, wrinkles of worries and laughter, it’s just an outside mark of the changes, chapters and cycles we carry inside.

It’s November 2019 and me and my partner are saying goodbye to our London chapter to the buzzing soundtrack of tattoo pens in the middle of Shoreditch. A place of many beginnings and a fresh new terrifying end. 

London will always remain a special place but after nearly a decade, we felt it was time to see if we might still have another adventure in us. I am from Czech and David is French and we wanted to travel the world and see where the land called us to put down the suitcases and roots, both praying it wouldn’t be our respective homelands that we left for a reason.

I left a piece of my heart in London, my history and myself here, pinned under the places and people that touched and shaped my soul. I have met my chosen family in London, I’ve built a home for that family that will go with me everywhere. 

This City, these people and stories and lessons, failures that seemed enormous and profound but in retrospect were really just the foam of the days, and victories that seemed too little to celebrate properly, but really were giant triumphs that shaped us for the next few chapters; this chunk of life surely deserves another bookmark on our skin.

For me, as a life long astrologer and tarot reader about to step into the wilderness to meet a new version of myself and our life together, the choice was always meant to fall onto a ‘compass’ from the Wheel of Fortune tarot card, to remind me that life is cyclical and to be open to all of its ebbs and flows.

It sat between my shoulder blades through many turns, many contractions that gave birth to new expansive growth. Just a few months into our new adventure, the plague would hit the Earth, uniting us all in the void that sucked in the world’s supply of toilet papers.

But we kept going. The Wheel kept turning. 

We travelled the world from the UK to the Americas and all the way down to Australia on board a luxury cruise ship; no, not as paying passengers. We worked winters in mountains and summer villas by the sea. And the Wheel kept turning.

Some friendships withered and died away and we kept going. Our parents kept getting older and weaker and the Wheel kept turning. We got married. We would eventually find home in Italy, in the middle of nowhere, first elated, then terrified when we realised the whole working from home is a great concept that the rest of the world caught up on.

All our uni degrees collecting dust, we fed this dream and barely ourselves by working at an olive oil factory (just to make sure to stay on brand with all the stereotypes about Italy), but that Wheel between my shoulder blades always reminded me, a new cycle would be just behind the corner. It always is.

Almost two years in, some sort of stability emerges slowly. 

“Is this a forever-home?” forever-worried parents demand to know. Is anywhere? In times our planet is going through a massive downturn on that great Wheel of Fortune, I’m struggling to give answers to anything.

Instead of promised lessons of resilience and growth through bravely facing up to adversities, 2025 threw chairs. Hard. Globally, it split open fault lines we’d been carefully stepping over for years. A manic political reality TV show that perfectly mirrors the collective mania fed by a total erosion of truth and bots that give validity to our worst human impulses, economic anxiety fueled by institutional collapse and a fast and furious dissolution of democracies, revealing just how hollowed out they’ve become.

In fact, not sure if you noticed, but some 80 years on, we’re getting a second season of that tired old fascism and genocide show. Who paid for this shit? And how come people still tune in and watch? It’s giving both tired as fuck and paralysingly apocalyptic, a wholesome combo.

But I also make sure I check my back when I finish my shower each night and remember, The Wheel is still here, still turning.

And 2026 will be the year corresponding to this tarot medicine. The Wheel of Fortune is often misunderstood as chaos. It isn’t. Chaos implies randomness. The Wheel is patterned. Cyclical. Relentless, yes, but not cruel. There is peace in assuming the wisdom of perpetual movements. We, as well as nature, as well as everything that is, one and the same thing all of the above, is light in motion.

It goes through birth to death to rebirth and yes, The Alan Parson’s Project fans know already that: What goes up must come down. What must rise must fall.

The problem isn’t that the wheel turns. The problem is how desperately we cling to one spoke and call it security. After the emotional devastation of 2025, the Wheel’s medicine is devastatingly simple: movement will happen whether you consent or not. 

The question is whether you exhaust yourself fighting it or learn how to ride?

To know this deeply and fully, to receive with gratitude the gifts of upward turn on the great wheel, knowing fully well nothing we hold in our hands, both literally and metaphorically, truly belongs to us with any permanence, and in turn to realise that any adversity is only a necessary preclusion to wheel turning in our favor again soon, means to move yourself into the eye of the storm, into the middle of the wheel where its perpetual motion affects you the least.

As I stand in this Italian silence, far from the Shoreditch buzz where this ink first met my skin, I realise that the forever-home my parents ask about isn’t a coordinate on a map. 

It’s that steady, silent axis at the very center of the rotation. The world will continue its frantic spin, and 2026 will surely bring its own brand of gravity, but I am no longer white-knuckling the rim. 

I am learning to be the axle; still, observant and deeply rooted & curious in the turn itself.

Read more from Kuba on Substack, here.