Six tricks are already forgotten, the seventh isn't

A torn sheet of lined paper, ripped free of a pad. Seven tricks written down one side: ollie, shove-it, kickflip, heelflip, 50-50, boardslide. Six have a tick beside them.

The seventh has no tick. Beside it, in pink, is a duration instead: 4 months.

A checklist is supposed to end in ticks. This one is more interesting for refusing to.

What is this list actually keeping track of?

Not tricks — how long each one took to stop being difficult.

Once a trick is ticked it's left the list of things this skater thinks about while doing them. The ollie at the top took an afternoon or a summer, depending on the skater, and by the time it's ticked, nobody remembers which. That's what a tick means here: not landed once, but landed so often it stopped being news.

Why put the tricks in this order?

Because it's roughly the order most people actually learn them in — nobody graded this list, it grew that way.

Ollie sits first because most of what follows depends on it: shove-it, kickflip and heelflip are variations built on the same pop, and 50-50 and boardslide need a board already under control before a ledge or a rail gets involved. Skateboarding has never settled on an official difficulty scale the way bouldering has argued its way to one — this order came from skater to skater, not from a committee.

What's the actual decision in a list like this?

Which trick sits in the unticked slot, and whether to put a duration beside it at all.

A bare unticked box says only "not yet". A duration says something sharper: this has been going badly for a specific, countable stretch and is still being attempted. Four months is long enough to be a small embarrassment and short enough to still be funny. That's the choice a version of this list actually makes — not which seven tricks, but how honestly to describe the one that hasn't happened.

Can a real skate shop or crew's name go on this?

If a specific shop or crew is the point, ask them — their name and their mark are theirs to license, the same as any other business's.

A skate shop, a board brand or a local crew's tag is a document somebody built, and shops license their names for merchandise routinely. Where the point isn't a specific shop, the invented version works at least as well, because a plain torn sheet with nobody's logo on it belongs entirely to the skater who's still four months into the seventh trick, with no shop's reputation riding on it.

Does this only work for skating?

No — it works for any skill with a line that hasn't moved yet.

A boxer's list of combinations, a run of guitar chords, a language learner's vocabulary set: the form is the same wherever most items are automatic and one is stuck. A shorter version — three tricks instead of seven, one unticked — works just as well as a gift for someone who's clearly mid-way through learning something, because the honesty is in the gap, not the length of the list.

What happens once the seventh trick finally lands?

Nothing to the shirt — it isn't a progress report, it's a record of a specific stretch of trying.

The tick would come off a fresh list, not this one. Four months unticked isn't a flaw the shirt needs fixing; it's the exact thing the shirt is about, the same way a season that ends badly doesn't make the fixture card wrong — the card was never claiming to know the score in advance.

Does it print well?

Yes — treated as handwriting on a torn page rather than a clean printed list.

White ink on washed black keeps the paper feel; save the pink for the tick marks and the TREFLIP line so the eye goes there first. The tear at the top edge should stay ragged rather than straight-cut — a straight edge reads as a printed border, a ragged one reads as paper that was actually ripped off a pad.

How do I get one made?

Describe your list at JustOG — the tricks, which one stays unticked, and whether it carries a duration. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Still four months, still unticked, still pink against six tricks nobody thinks about any more.