About Me

I grew up in the south west of England in a house full of antiques, taxidermy, and handpainted furniture my parents brought back from years of travelling. My dad is from Zambia, and our home was always filled with African music, tribal masks, and objects gathered from across the world. My parents ran a small antique and homewares shop, which was just their way of making a life of travel possible, and I feel very lucky to have grown up that way.
We travelled to India for the first time when I was six, and my whole family fell in love with it. During that trip I was mesmerised by images of deities, and remember being particularly transfixed by a painting in Goa with an astrological chart. That was probably the beginning of my interest in mysticism, cosmic imagery, and the occult, themes that have never really left me. My first henna tattoo was on that same trip, and I think it planted something early: this idea of the body as a temple and adorning our skin with art. Most years we would travel to India, China or Thailand alongside countries across Europe, the Caribbean, and North Africa, and that insatiable desire to travel has never left me either!

I studied Fine Art specialising in painting, and threw myself into everything I could find, sculpture, ceramics, sewing, costume making , which eventually led me to body painting. I grew up going to festivals and began painting bodies at club nights and music festivals. I loved using the body as a canvas, working with its contours, trying to express something of a person’s essence through pattern on skin. That is still at the heart of every tattoo I make.

The direction of my life changed one day in Brighton, when friend showed me the work of the late tattoo artist Xed Le Head. I had never seen large scale ornamental tattoos before, and in that moment I knew exactly what I wanted to do! I found a tattoo apprenticeship at nineteen, about 6 months later. 
I moved to Melbourne at twenty-one with no plans to stay, and thirteen years later, here I am!

Alongside tattooing I hold a 200-hour yoga teacher qualification and have an ongoing practice in yoga philosophy and am exploring Tibetan Buddhism, something that deepened significantly through several trips to the Himalayas over recent years. The art found in temples and monasteries across Asia has been a constant influence on the way I see and make things. My work moves through themes of deity iconography, folklore, mysticism, ornamental pattern, psychedelic art, and the natural world.

I love the collaborative side of tattooing as much as the making itself. Hearing someone’s story, finding the image that holds it, and going through that process together, that is where the magic lives for me!