Portfolio

Featuring select pieces that combine personal connection with timeless elegance

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Amanda’s hydrangea

Amanda reached out with a relatively straightforward request: a hydrangea on her forearm. Apart from a couple of parameters that made it special to her—that we emphasize ten blooms in particular and that the color lean purple rather than pink—she was quite open to its size, placement, and other features.

While there are over 70 species of hydrangeas, only one (Hydrangea macrophylla) has been cultivated widely to over 600 ornamental varieties. Most hydrangea cultivars have two main distinguishing features: large heads of clustered flowers and pH-sensitive floral pigments. A striking blue is produced in acidic soils (pH <5.5) due to the uptake of freed soil aluminum to the flowers and its binding to the floral pigment. In a more basic soil (pH > 6.5, in this case), aluminum remains bound in the soil and the pigment’s natural pink color is observed.

By focusing on sharp detail and saturated color in the focal flowers, Amanda now has a hydrangea flower tattoo that is neither a mass of indistinguishable flowers nor a bouquet in the same degree of focus. We emphasized the important parts and let the rest blur naturally in support.

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Marjorie’s Florida scrub jay

Marjorie is from Florida but currently resides near Cincinnati, OH. She has worked in research and monitoring for various state wildlife agencies, which has led her to live in Montana, California, Alaska, Indiana, and New York. Despite several cross-country moves, or perhaps because of them, Marjorie wanted to represent her roots in Florida with a bird tattoo.

The Florida scrub jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens) is the only endemic bird of Florida, and only one of 15 endemic to the continental United States. Its habitat in central Florida is a relic of times long ago—approximately 30 million years ago, this portion of Florida was an island. Its biodiversity developed separately from the mainland, and still hosts today a variety of endemic oaks, shrubs, and cacti.

Marjorie’s scrub jay is banded, referring to the metal identification tag on the leg that she referenced in her monitoring surveys. Her scrub jay is also perched in an alert pose on a sand live oak (Quercus geminata), appropriate for this habitat that Marjorie remembers fondly.

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Katy’s roses

Katy came to me with a common request: a flower tattoo to represent her family members on her shoulder. A very common way to do this is by making an assortment that features the flower from each person’s birth month. While a common approach, I often ask whether there is a more personal way to represent each individual, rather than by arranging various flowers that may not look very cohesive together, that the person may not particularly like, or that the person potentially has never even heard of or seen before.

In talking with her, we realized that she had planted roses shortly after moving into a new house, around the time she started her family. They grew as her family did, and this light pink variety was her favorite. By varying the sizes of the blooms, they each represent a person in birth order. The size progression around her shoulder keeps the smallest in the front, creating an elegant taper of the arrangement toward the chest. The largest, Katy herself, is featured on the back. As the size progresses so does the color, beginning soft and light in the bud and finally to incorporate purple on the outside petals of the largest, which is Katy’s favorite color.

By focusing on the environment around her, Katy now wears a rose tattoo that is beautiful to passers-by but that hold personal significance beyond what birth month flowers could.

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Melinda’s Kankakee mallow

Melinda is from Kankakee, IL. She resides in Chicago now, about 60 miles north, but wanted to commemorate her hometown. In determining the subject matter, her choice was clear: the Kankakee mallow.

Kankakee mallow (Iliamna remota) is a “critically imperiled” species that is endemic to Langham Island, a small island in the Kankakee River that is now a protected state park. Of the mallow family’s 4225 species, it was critical that we accurately depicted this specific one.

Surveys of the population size have varied widely but never numerous: 180 stems in 1981, over 1600 in 2002, and none in 2014. This marked decline was likely due to the suppression of fire and the encroachment of invasive species—a controlled burn in 2014 stimulated the germination of the soil’s seed bank and resurrected the Kankakee mallow with new sprouts in 2015.

Melinda now wears a Kankakee mallow wildflower tattoo as a tribute to where she’s from and the resiliency of this special plant.

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Cindy’s chicory and ladybug

Cindy reached out with interest in a large, realistic ladybug that looked like it was sitting on her skin. Her father always called her “Bug” growing up, and she wanted a tribute to her “greatest advocate and a loving man.” As we talked about the idea, she thought it would be fitting to place the ladybug onto an “unpretentious” flower. She listed several common wildflowers. To contrast with the red of the ladybug, I suggested that we place it onto a cool-toned flower.

Common chicory (Cichorium intybus) is native to Europe but common in disturbed areas, such as roadsides, in North America, China, and Australia. Being entirely edible, European migrants cultivated chicory’s leaves for salad greens, its roots as a coffee substitute, and the plant generally as a nutritious livestock feed. With prolific flowers of periwinkle blue, chicory is one of my personal favorite wildflowers.

Cindy found a way to represent a person important to her by incorporating a personal nickname into a beautiful botanical tattoo.

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Val’s garland of national flowers

Traveling is important to Val, and she has visited a long list of countries. She reached out with the idea to create a travel tattoo—a collection of mementos that she could wear, and add to, as she continues to travel. She was interested in a garland of flowers, stitched together and draping across her chest, back, and eventually down her arms. With 11 countries to start, we set out to balance the colors, shapes, sizes, and for this piece, the geographies of the flowers to include.

Val’s list of initial countries included Italy, Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Indonesia, and Cayman Islands, all pictured above. Their national flowers varied widely, including some that were slender with multiple blooms (e.g. Sweden’s bluebells and Cayman Islands’ wild banana orchid), large but simple (Italy’s lily), large but complex (Mexico’s dahlia), and others with challenging colors (Canada’s and Indonesia’s white flowers). Some we had choice in, while others we didn’t—the color of Italy’s lily and Mexico’s dahlia is unspecified, whereas the colors of the rest were fixed. My goal was to arrange these elements in a way that felt natural, asymmetrical but balanced. For example, placing the two orchids on the shoulders helped to lighten the arrangement toward the top-outer edges, and followed the curve of the shoulders. We even added a few extras throughout, like the firefly (that glows!) on the stem of the moon orchid, which is Indiana’s state insect.

Val reports that she is often stopped in airports and in the countries she’s visiting, asking if her tattoos are real. She is happy to confirm that they are, and that her floral tattoo collection is admired while continuing to grow.

Check out my social media pages for more examples of my recent work.

Your time to shine

"When a short-sleeved t-shirt shows a tease, I'm approached by strangers asking to see it. It gets rave reviews."

"FYI - the tally is up to 16 on people complimenting my tattoos, asking where you're located, THEN telling me to get you to move here [South Carolina]."

"Soooooo you just received the highest level of compliment that I'm pretty sure you can get..... my dermatologist is obsessed with my flowers and had several others come in to look at it."

“I cannot tell you how many compliments I get still. I am sad because the weather is getting chilly and I have to cover it up, but it is still so beautiful.”

“My friend told me she had such a bad experience getting her old tattoo that she never wanted to go through it again even to get it fixed. But she was inspired to reach out to you by my new ones because they are so beautiful.”

“Quote from my mom: 'I don't like tattoos, but I can't help but love that one.' I thought that was the perfect testament to the quality of your work. I didn't think my mom would ever be a fan of any of my tattoos. So that says a lot.”

“I love my tattoo from Daniel more than any of my other work. He created a beautiful, colorful, and realistic image that people constantly notice and compliment. Would recommend to anyone, but especially for people who want something a little different than basic flash.”

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