Inappropriate Tattoo

        I decided I was going to be a painter when I was 9 and then never stopped painting. Instead of going out to recess I painted cartoons on the classroom windows. Most of my high school years were spent in the art block and then I did one year of Art School at CCAC in Oakland. I had gotten my first tattoo at 15 and when I got my 3rd tattoo at 18, I realized how easy it was and started to fill a sketchbook of my own original tattoo designs...mostly symmetrical geometric black work. Tattooing didn't pan out to be easy in the slightest but somehow that youthful blind courage allowed me to fight my way into an apprenticeship with James and Chris at Dancing Dragon in Oak Grove/Nashville. Back then it was way more of a male dominated field than it is now and I couldn't even get anyone to look  at my sketchbook. James told me they were looking for an apprentice but they were looking for a dude and I was raised by a feminist so I called them every few days when I got mad enough and told them they couldn't do that, it wasn't right and they finally agreed to let me come in for a drawing test.  Basically I had a certain amount of time to draw a  list of common tattoos of that time... A skull, a rose, a heart ...this was before tribal and cheese hole skin rips were even happening...anyways, James wanted to see how I handled working under stress so he stood over my shoulder criticizing my drawings and counting down the time until I threw an eraser at him and told him to get the fuck away from me and apparently that's the reason they agreed to apprentice me. I worked very hard for that information which was heavily guarded... making everyone's needles, scrubbing everyone's tubes, I lived at the shop and had to carry a gun. From then on for about 10 years I was mistaken for the counter girl and told by people that they would never let a girl tattoo them. And to this day it is assumed by many that I fucked my way into an apprenticeship or I must have been married to an artist because those were the ways a woman got into the industry.  Thank you James and Chris for giving me a chance and treating me well. ( Except for that time you shot me up close with a blank, James, WTF???!!!!) 

     So James scared the shit out of me when he shot me with a blank because he was mad at me for making plans to travel and tattoo in Australia for a year...but that's where I got the chance to tattoo alongside one of my idols, Kiwi Kim at her studio in Newtown Sydney, NSW, as well as a handful of other shops in Adelaide, SA and along the eastern coast of Australia. After returning to the states I applied at  Erno Tattoo in San Francisco at the corner of Haight and Fillmore but I got hired at their sister shop in Santa Cruz down by the boardwalk and worked there for 3 years. Cory Norris was the funny guy that hung around a lot getting tattooed by Iggy Evans my co-worker, check him out now... Next I put in about a year at the Gauntlet, a piercing shop in the Castro in San Francisco that gave me a tattoo room....and then I moved to New Orleans for the first time. I worked for the year of 1999 at Electric Expressions in Kenner for Henri and English Craig and then when my Dad moved to Kauai I followed. 

     Within the year my husband Lad Bak and I opened Blue Kauai Tattoo in Hanalai on the North Shore where we tattooed for around 5 years.  After selling the shop I worked for my good friends Chanel and Acacia at Little Tsunami in Kapaa for a couple of years at the most amazing all ladies shop until I randomly decided to leave paradise and move to Alaska and work at Inked Monkey in Anchorage for one horrifying year.

          It's OK, it's over, I survived the winter!  Life is good down South...I've been travelling and tattooing for the past six years and when I'm home in New Orleans, I take appointments at my private studio in Uptown.  (808) 482-1442

                                                                 Age 23 working at Kiwi Kim's Celtic Dragon in Sydney Australia

                                  Erno's girlfriend Lynn and I working the booth at the San Francisco Tattoo Convention in 1996