September 2025, my 40th anniversary in tattooing was spent in my hometown of Sterling, Colorado taking care of my parents and packing 70 years of their collected belongings into 10 boxes to move in with us.  Dad is 91 with dementia and Mother is 89.  It’s now June, 2026 and I’m finally getting around to an update?  As many of you know, our lives have been dramatically changed with the care of my parents.  Tom’s dad is 96 and still able to manage his personal care and likes being independent so he has not yet moved into our home, we haven’t a clue when that day will come but we are ready.

Just as an aside and to try to help sell my parents home — I think their former St. Anthony’s convent would be perfect for a bed and breakfast tattoo hotel.  Zoned residential and commercial, there are so many possibilities.  If we didn’t have our lives firmly rooted in Maryland, we would have considered turning their home into the above mentioned idea!  Here is the address if you are interested or know anyone who is — using zillow.com type in  303 South Third Street  Sterling, Colorado  80751  My sister in law is selling the home, her name is Michelle Michieli so give her a call to visit then buy that house!  I do request that a room be reserved for me at the end of the hall — it still has the glittery skull and crossbones image glued to the door.

I spent a small fortune building a serenity garden for my parents, planting native flowers and building berms.  I did not plant the marijuana; child #5 did that and then blamed it on birds shitting out the seeds so he could save face … but the home and yard is beautiful so give it a peek and let me know what you think!  Call me on 410-768-6471.

Onward with the rest of the story — see the continuation below!

Way back in *1978 I was a college student studying to be a special education teacher.  Our cousin Leroy Bettini, along with our neighbor Miss Gerry, both kindred spirits with Trisomy 21.  My favorite people of all as God made these two (and other T21 babies) so very special.  No hatred, only loving kindness.  How we are all meant to be.  Anyway, I digress … my love and appreciation for special needs beings was and is, profound.  They have so much to show us in how to be a human being.

After several years honing my student teaching skills working at the parent infant education program in Arlington, Virginia (now a welfare clinic–thanks FPL 94142) and then moving to the Association for Retarded Citizens in Washington, DC to work with adults, I found myself in a vortex of chaos and insanity at the ARC.

“ARC” as it is called had no idea how to educate the “Fall Out Folks” from FPL 94142.  We (teachers, instructors, social workers and clients) found ourselves warehoused in a cramped old church until the new facility could be built.  This environment was not conducive to higher learning.  Especially for the folks sent there to wait out their lives performing the mindless task of placing green stickers on mail.  Repetition as a learning device was appropriate for some occasions but not for a life-long activity.  It was several years of hell.  Not with the special needs folks but with the administration.  Admins took four martini lunches and never came back to work.  We were left to our own creative devices on how to un-fuck what the government had fucked.

Twenty-one “clients” filed into my designated area every morning at 7:45 am.  My job description was to teach the folks displaced from the closures of institutions how to read metrobus maps and count bus change for eventual employment in their respective communities.  My battle cry was “my clients can’t brush their teeth nor tie their shoes and you expect me to teach your version of life skills?”  Bloody Hell!  I can barely read bus routes or figure out transfer tickets (I can count change) Bloody Hell!  We needed to start from scratch!  Basic life skills — screw the government and its demands the FOF learn bus routes! My employer told me to bring a big cup of coffee to work along with a copy of War and Peace, pretty much to just shut my mouth and collect a paycheck.  Not my style.

Fall Out Folks are creative too —  Art is action!

  I brought in art supplies and began teaching my FOF creative expressionism.  This pissed off the powers that be and other instructors, who were perfectly content to sip coffee all day then skate an hour before closing.  I didn’t care, I was hired to instruct and that’s what I was going to do.  Clients from other rooms began to filter into our area as they could see things were happening.  Maria Montessori stated “one cannot learn in a vacuum” and I certainly agreed with her statement.  ARC was a vacuum and I had to change this to survive in this place.  When I brought in shovels and seeds, the admins freaked.  I thought it a good idea to get outside in the fresh air, till the ground and plant seeds.  Teach FOF how to grow their own vegetables and flowers.  It was the beginning of the end of my career there.

The day I was attacked by a young man who had set his eyes on one of my young lady “clients” was the death knell of my time at ARC.  I asked him to leave her alone and was met with the sound of a box cutter being ratcheted open.  We had been trained not to defend ourselves but to call security.  They must’ve been on a day long coffee break as no one responded.  I was pregnant with my fifth child so I ran out the door.  Pulling the door shut on the closet in the hallway — slash-slash-slash-slash.  He cut my wrist with the box cutter.  Fortunately the janitor corralled him and I left the building, bleeding.  Never to return.

1984

It’s summer.  It’s hot.  Cooling off in the kiddie pool with my five kids, we heard cat calls from a fireman friend of ours — he hailed to the yard sporting a new tattoo.  “Ya know, ya could do this!  With your art skills and training, ya could do this!”  So I went and got a tattoo at great southern in College Park.  The place was filled with people in an open format style, no privacy.  Small, cramped and smoky, it was  my turn.  I had chosen a rose to be placed on my hip.  It was $350.00, half our mortgage payment.  “Drop the laundry!” barked the lady with ill fitting cowboy boots and a smudged sweatshirt.  Hmmm.  I asked for a sheet of some sort to cover my ass which every swinging dick could see.  It wasn’t a pleasant experience; she smelled of an ashtray and growled a lot but I was hooked.  I wanted more.

The lady started coloring in my rose backwards and when I stopped her, she asked if I was a tattoo artist.  “No, but I create other artforms and you’re coloring in this rose wrong.”  Oddly enough, the next day she showed up at our home, bearing coffee.  Offering me an apprenticeship, she said she liked my “sauciness.”  Unhappy working at the shop where I met her, she was seeking a way out.  Wanted to open her own shop.  She thought I’d be good at tattooing because of my attitude.  lynn iverson.  Even typing her name makes my skin crawl but she gave me the opportunity to learn the craft of tattooing.  That summer was spent pigment mixing, needle building, drawing flash all summer, practicing the art of tattoo on family members and friends then we opened Dark Horse Tattoo in Hyattsville, MD Labor Day weekend, 1985.  I count my first paid application of a small bird tattoo as the beginning of my professional career.

My son Jacob was born in 1984 and I was still nursing him so I’d run home to feed him when the sitter called to let me know he was hungry though lactation clearly let me now in advance just how hungry he was!  It was a wonderful time of life, so it seemed. The studio was busy, I was earning a decent living, my kids were well cared for by Millie, a Jamaican woman we sponsored through our church; nothing could go wrong, eh?  I let her tattoo my whole back.  That’s what went wrong.  This is when I learned this “teacher” had but less than two years tattoo experience and I gave her my whole back to tattoo???  The Mike Malone dragon I had chosen, that I thought was perfect, she completely ruined the design because of her inexperience.  But … that was the least of my problems; working in that small and cramped shop with a lunatic for a partner and her perverted husband, (they were both looking for a “wife” — hell to the no!  I’m Catholic. Monogamous. Straight.) I jumped at the chance to move to a studio in Arlington, Va.  I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Tom was applying a backpiece of a sushi eating Santa Clause on the lunatic and she brought me up to Dragon Moon Tattoo to meet Tom and his then spouse, Juli.  I got my earlobe tattooed with a little orchid from Juli and they both wanted to see the dragon backpiece the lunatic was busy ruining.  I could hear the muffled gasps from two experienced tattooists who knew they were looking at a tattoo abortion.  They nicknamed the tattoo “the dragon headed worm” which I found out much later when I was actually hired by Juli in 1987.  Back to Rick for now!

Tattooing less than a year, no one was really interested in hiring on a rookie but Rick Cherry took me in and I sat down the very day I left Dark Horse and applied a large eagle on a man’s arm.  He came back a few days later with all the black outline and shading gone … only the feet, beak and eyes were left with any color.  WTF?    Rick laughed.  I had neglected to boil down the pelican and just used it straight from the bottle … ahhhh, learning was tough with the old farts, they liked to keep “secrets” to themselves.  Now one can teach themselves to tattoo looking at videos on youtube, incredible!  Still working at Rick’s I yearned to work with Tom and Juli.  Their studio was clean, friendly and filled with creative energy.  I called Paul Rogers (God bless P. Rogers!) and asked him if he could be a reference for me.  He said yes and he called Tom and Juli, recommending I would be a good candidate to teach real tattooing as I would be a good student.