Niamh Davis tattoos skin in Arizona so that something stops being visible.
Almost everything else done with a needle and pigment is meant to be noticed. Her work runs the other way. Scar camouflage and areola restoration succeed only when the viewer cannot tell that anything happened at all, which makes it one of the strangest and most instructive corners of appearance we have found so far.
We wrote to her because her clients arrive after something has already happened to them.
Surgery, injury, childbirth, a mastectomy. They do not come to become someone else. They come to stop being interrupted every time they look down. That is appearance stripped of vanity and reduced to consequence, which is exactly the part of the subject most people never talk about.
What follows is her own account, lightly edited, in her words.
She answered all eight questions at length, and the interesting thing is how rarely she talks about pigment. She talks about what people actually asked for, which is almost never what they said.
Most tattooing adds something a person wants seen. Your work makes something stop being seen. What did you have to unlearn to work that way?
Paramedical tattooing and graphic tattooing are very different in that respect. Graphic tattooing is generally intended to be seen. It stands out and becomes part of what you notice when you look at the skin. With paramedical tattooing, we’re trying to accomplish almost the opposite.
More ink or a darker color doesn’t necessarily produce a better result. I had to approach pigment differently and understand that sometimes less is more. I work in layers, almost like watercolor, gradually building and adjusting the color so that it blends into the surrounding skin.
The goal isn’t for someone to look at my work and think, “That’s a great tattoo.” Ideally, they can’t tell that anything was done at all.
Clients come to you after surgery, injury or childbirth. What do they say they want when they book, and what does it turn out they actually wanted?
I think, ultimately, most people just want to feel like themselves again.
Someone who has undergone a mastectomy may come to me asking for areola restoration, but there can be something much deeper behind that request. They want to look down at their body and feel complete again. I’m given an opportunity to assist them with one part of that healing process.
It’s similar with other surgeries. Even when scarring is discussed beforehand, understanding that a scar may occur and actually living with that scar afterward can be very different experiences. I work with many clients who have facelift scars, for example. Their request might technically be, “I want these scars camouflaged,” but what they tell me is, “I want to be able to put my hair up again.”
Sometimes what sounds like a request to change a small area of skin is really a request to have an ordinary part of their life back.
Describe the moment a client first looks in the mirror after a session. What happens in the room?
It’s different for every client and every type of treatment. With areola tattooing, the result can be appreciated much more immediately because we’re intentionally creating visible color and dimension on the skin.
Scar and stretch mark camouflage can be different. Immediately following treatment, the skin can become red and inflamed, so what the client sees right after the procedure isn’t necessarily representative of what the healed result will look like. Because of that, I often show my clients the area while I’m working, before significant redness or irritation develops. It gives them an opportunity to see what I’m seeing and an idea of what they can anticipate once everything has healed.
For some clients, that “mirror moment” happens in my studio. For others, it happens weeks later at home when the skin has healed and the pigment has settled. Paramedical tattooing requires patience, and sometimes the most meaningful result isn’t something we get to see immediately.
A scar is evidence that something happened and that the person survived it. How do you think about removing that evidence?
I don’t see what I do as removing evidence. I see it as restoration.
The scar is still there. I’m not erasing what happened to that person or removing that part of their history. I’m changing how visually prominent it is. People come to me because they have made the decision that they don’t want that scar to be a visible reminder of whatever caused it, whether that was trauma, surgery, an accident, or even an elective procedure. That decision belongs to them.
At the end of the day, I don’t view scar camouflage as erasure. I view it as giving someone a degree of control over how they see their body and, in many cases, helping them restore something they feel they lost.
3D areola restoration is an illusion built with pigment on flat skin. What does that teach you about how people actually read a body?
The tattoo itself is objectively flat. There isn’t actually three-dimensional projection there, but through color, highlights, shadows and placement, we can create the visual perception of dimension. The eye sees those differences in light and color, and the brain interprets them as shape and depth.
I’ve also had the opportunity to work with a client who had nipple prostheses, which I found really exciting. The prostheses provided actual physical projection, while tattooing allowed me to create the color and visual detail of the areola and surrounding area. In my opinion, combining the two can be a game changer because you’re no longer relying solely on the illusion of dimension, the physical and visual elements can work together.
Experiences like that have reinforced for me how much of what we perceive about a body is a combination of its physical structure and the visual information our brain uses to interpret it.
Some clients decide in the end to keep the scar. What makes someone choose that, and what do you say to them?
It’s their body, their story and their choice.
I don’t believe every scar needs to be camouflaged. Some people have memories attached to their scars, and those memories aren’t necessarily bad ones. A scar can represent something someone survived, something they chose, a child they had, or simply a part of their life they don’t feel any need to change.
If someone decides they want to keep their scar, then they should keep it. I’m not here to convince anyone that something about their body needs to be fixed. Paramedical tattooing is an option. It’s there for the person who looks at a scar and decides they would rather not see it anymore. The person who looks at theirs and says, “This is part of me, and I’m keeping it,” has made an equally valid choice.
You work this closely with the parts people hide. How has that changed what you notice about strangers, or about your own reflection?
I think, if anything, it has given me a greater sense of self-acceptance and a greater appreciation for what the human body is capable of.
Over the years, I’ve worked closely with many different bodies and many different kinds of scars. I also try to get to know my clients while they’re in the studio with me. When you’re spending several hours together, people talk. They tell me about what happened, what they’ve been through and what brought them to me. People have overcome so much. After hearing enough of those stories, you realize that what you’re seeing on someone’s skin may represent only a tiny part of what that person has experienced.
So perhaps it has changed my reflection less in terms of what I physically notice and more in how I think about people. Bodies change. They heal. They carry evidence of our experiences. And people go through incredibly difficult things and still get up the next day and keep moving forward. There is something very human and very humbling about being trusted with those parts of people’s stories.
Which case has stayed with you longest, and why that one?
I don’t know that I can choose only one. Different clients have stayed with me for very different reasons.
I remember working with a teenager who had scars from self-harm. She shared some of her story with me, and as a mother, everything in me wanted to go into “mama bear” mode. There are some clients whose stories affect you beyond the technical work you’re performing.
Another client had been in a serious car accident approximately fifteen years earlier. She had prominent scarring across her face, including her forehead and around her eye. She told me that she had essentially hidden herself for fifteen years because of those scars. After finding paramedical tattooing and coming to me for treatment, she wasn’t hiding anymore.
Those are two very different people and two very different circumstances, but both stayed with me. That’s probably why it’s difficult for me to identify a single case. I’m working on someone’s skin, but attached to that skin is a person and a story. I’ve had many clients whose experiences have touched me for completely different reasons, and I think I carry a little bit of each of those stories with me.
Three things worth taking from this conversation.
First, that when someone asks for a change to their appearance, the request on the form and the request underneath it are rarely the same sentence. Nobody wants a camouflaged scar. They want to put their hair up again. Second, that depth on a body is read, not measured, which is why an illusion built in pigment on flat skin works on the brain exactly as well as the real thing. And third, that keeping a scar and removing one are the same kind of decision, made by the same person, about the same body. The only wrong version is the one somebody else chose for you.
Niamh Davis runs Empowered Ink in Arizona, working in scar camouflage and restorative tattooing: instagram.com/empowered_ink