My name’s Winona,

I’m 29 and I was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. I relocated to California in 2021 and currently live and work in Los Angeles as a professional tattoo artist.

I started my career tattooing back in 2010, I’ve always been artistic, and have a lot of artists throughout my family but there were multiple factors throughout my life that lead me into the profession.

Growing up I loved archaeology and history and had a big interest in Ancient civilizations, most of which have a long history involving tattooing. I originally thought I would go on to be an Archaeologist.

My dad always had a lot of tattoos, my mom has none. Dad had sticker tattoos on both arms which he eventually covered up with two big black old school tribal pieces and he has a colored joker on his shoulder which as a kid he would let me color in so I could “make it fresh”. I remember he would come home with cling wrap on and carry his aftercare cream with him, so my dad is really how i was exposed to actual tattoos.

From 2008-2009 My mom was offered a job teaching at a restaurant that had just opened up in Western Samoa which she accepted. My mom, sister, and I all relocated to Samoa where I attended Robert Louis Stevenson School for 9th grade. Samoa has a big tattooing culture as well and I loved learning about the history of the tattoos and started to use their patterns in alot of my drawings. Samoa was and still is a special place for me, it was a major culture shock in the best way, I learnt alot there and made friends that now live all over the world.

When we returned back to Melbourne towards the end of 2009 I started at a new school and would draw patterns on my books, school uniform and on friends. I eventually convinced my mom to let me drop out in the middle of 10th grade because I thought I randomly wanted to pursue Hairdressing. She bought all the materials for me and enrolled me into a Hairdressing course in the City. I was there for about 6 months until I dropped out of that too. I thought it was going to be really design based and didn’t realize how much theory was involved so I just ended up bored, drawing designs all over the practice heads. After I left the course, my mom took me with her to the Melbourne Career Expo. Within the first 5 minutes I saw a booth that had a few heavily tattooed guys standing around and they were advertising a “tattoo school”. I told my mom that’s what I was interested in and at first she wasn’t so happy about it but she let me enroll and bought me everything I needed. The course was once a week and it was me and about 10 other students, we would meet at a hotel room and we would practice the basics of tattooing. After completing that I would tattoo friends from the garage of my house and a few months later I had seen a studio that was opening just down the street from where we lived. I went down to apply for an apprenticeship, they gave me an interview and I got the job on a trial basis, I was so excited. All the artists including the owner at the time were Samoan too so it was really cool to still be able to have that influence and connection going into my first studio. I can’t remember clearly what happened but after my trial they decided not to take me on, after which I went on to work at Mcdonalds for a few months followed up by KFC. Eventually I went back to the studio and asked them to give me another chance which they did and I’ve been tattooing ever since.

Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to have friends that supported me and trusted me enough to let me practice my work on them. I’ve been able to travel and work in many different countries and it’s opened a lot of doors for me.

I’ve added some old pictures below as visuals for you.