Chelsea Holloway owns Earth Alchemy Tattoo on Cherokee Street. The shop (2839 Cherokee, 314-899-0891) inks up customers by appointment, Monday through Saturday.
• I’ve been tattooing for eight years. I ended up opening my shop to create a better place for myself and for other artists. I had the idea of it being more a collective.
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• In the St. Louis tattoo community, there are more traditional tattooers than there are neotraditional or realistic or other styles. Traditional is that Sailor Jerry type of flash art. My shop is more flexible. We are more open-minded with the newer styles.
• I’ve been into art since I was a kid. When I was 16, I got my first tattoo from a street shop. That was very impersonal. I just picked something off the wall, and it wasn’t really what I imagined it to be, so I kind of got disenchanted by it.
• There’s always room for growth in the tattoo industry. There’s always somebody who’s going to be better than you, so you can stay challenged as long as you want to.
• I think people make the mistake of using Pinterest way too much for tattoo ideas, so there’s a lot of very monotonous, generic tattoos—the bird silhouettes, the infinity sign with the name in it. A lot of people don’t realize that when they are trying to get something unique, they are getting the generic Pinterest white-girl tattoo.
•I have a lot on my legs that I like. I like the leg tattoos because I get to see them more, and it’s a big space, so you can usually do really cool stuff with it.
• I don’t think I ever really kept count of the number of tattoos I have.
• It’s kind of like being a hairstylist or a bartender, where you really connect with people, because I’m sitting with them for hours at a time. It’s really made me a lot more aware of how much we judge people when we first meet them. If you sit down and talk to somebody for a few hours, it’s almost impossible not to find something you like about them.
• The tattoo industry is on the upswing because of the television shows [Miami Ink, Ink Master, et al]. I haven’t gotten to see a lot of them because I’m not really into television, but I think it’s made it more acceptable for people, especially older people, to see it more as a mainstream expression rather than a fringe, biker sort of culture.
• I have a 9-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy. They have this whole Lego city, this complex city with its own economy and all these things going on in it, and one of them is the mayor of the city, and they both own tattoo shops where they draw tattoos on their Lego guys with permanent marker.
