What got me into Tattooing?

Story time.

Mind you the time line maybe off by a year or two. Much of my youth is a blurr.

Who got me into Tattooing?

My mom initially. I was around fifteen going on sixteen. Around 1983. Both my parents were pretty heavily tattooed. For the time period. My mom knew a few traveling tattooers and kept getting told that I should get into the art. Since, “I always was drawing.” That it might be a good profession for me, was their reasoning. So, one of my mom’s tattooer friends asked if I would tattoo him. He wanted one of my female figure drawings. I obliged.
What was my reaction to doing my first tattoo? I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t like the pressure of someone in my creative space and mostly didn’t like that I was hurting someone. It was weird.
Shortly there after, I got my first tattoo at a punk party in NW Portland at someone’s apartment.
I don’t recall who the tattooer was now. Or who’s apartment it was in. But man, did that little three flowered bracelet hurt! When I came back to visit my mom’s house. I heard my mom bark out from the kitchen the name she used when I was in trouble. I was like, “I just walked into the house! wth!” She proceeded to ask me about my new tattoo. “How did she know?!!!” I showed her and explained it represented her, my sister and I. She appreciated the sentiment. But laughed at me and said, “That’s it?” She pulled down her shirt to show me an elaborate piece started on her back by the same tattooer who had just worked on me. He had told her I had been a pain in the ass. Small world indeed.
A few years later while hanging out at the Satryicon, Don introduced himself to me. I had started picking up painting window displays downtown, drawing projects for band friends and designing tattoos for folks who were bringing them into his shop to have tattooed. It must have quirked his curiousity. Because he asked me if I was interested in being a tattooer. I was like, “o hell no!” I told him my tattoo story. He told me that if I ever decided to get into tattooing to contact him.
At that time, I was like, “yay, no thanks!” Too out there for me.
After some time, I began writing Don as a pen pal. I still have all his letters. During our correspondence, the idea of learning the trade from him, seemed the path that I was supposed to take on. “Thanks Mom.”
He re-offered me an apprenticeship. I accepted. He later told me, “that becoming a tattooer would be really hard for me, that one in a hundred people could make it in this trade and that being a female coming into this male dominated profession would be even more difficult”.

I took on the challenge with my everything.

And the path unfolded.