I left corporate.
I rebuilt everything.
And I’m nowhere near done.

The short version

I treat the skin that carries a story.

I’m a paramedical tattoo specialist in Scottsdale, Arizona. I work with people who are living with scars, stretch marks, hypopigmentation, hair loss — physical reminders of surgeries, childbirths, accidents, autoimmune conditions, and choices they made years ago that look different now than they did then.

My job is to soften that visible reminder. Not to erase it — to give it a quieter presence on someone’s body so it stops being the first thing they see in the mirror.

I also train the next generation of paramedical artists at TGS Lab Academy — a three-day intensive that’s one of the few Arizona State Licensed paramedical schools in the country.

And I wrote a book about how I built all of it after leaving a corporate career in my late forties. It’s called WTF: What The Fifties?

The long version

How TGS Lab started.

I didn’t grow up dreaming of being a paramedical tattoo artist. There wasn’t really a path to point at. For most of my career, I worked in roles that other people thought I should want — stable, well-paid, predictable. I was good at them. I was also bored, and I knew it, and I told no one.

What I’d always loved was helping people look like themselves again. Not in the airbrushed, magazine-cover way — in the I-recognize-this-face-now way. I’d seen what it did for my mother, what it did for friends after surgery, what it could do for women who’d carried bodies through three pregnancies and didn’t quite know whose skin they were in anymore.

So in my forties, I started over.

I got my Certified Medical Assistant credential first — because if I was going to work this close to people’s bodies, I wanted the clinical foundation to do it safely. Then I added Licensed Electrologist, then Licensed Massage Therapist. I trained in PMU. I trained in paramedical camouflage. I sought out Nue Conceal’s founder and trained there too — that’s the technique I use today for the most delicate work.

I rented a single chair inside a salon studio building in Scottsdale and started taking clients. Most of them came back. Most of them sent friends. Within a few years I had a real practice, real referrals from local dermatologists and plastic surgeons, and a waiting list.

Somewhere in there I wrote the book. I’d been keeping notes the whole time — about the leap, about the impostor moments, about the moments a client cried in a good way for the first time in years. The notes turned into chapters, the chapters turned into WTF: What The Fifties?, and the book turned into something I never planned: a second audience. Women who’d never need scar camouflage, who’d never train to do it, but who wanted to know that someone else had made the leap and lived.

“If I’d known how good the second act would be, I’d have started it sooner.”

Then in 2026 the state of Arizona approved TGS Lab Academy as a Conditionally Licensed paramedical training school under the Arizona State Board for Private Postsecondary Education. We were one of the only schools in the state to clear that bar.

What started as a single chair is now a working studio, a published book, a verified Instagram audience, and a regulated training school — all of it built on the same belief I started with: that helping people feel at home in their own skin is real work, and the people who do it deserve to be taken seriously.

I’m not done. The next location is in planning. The next cohort is enrolling. The next book idea is on my phone.

Welcome to TGS Lab.

Credentials

The training behind the work.

• ✦ Certified Medical Assistant — the clinical foundation: anatomy, infection control, patient interaction
• ✦ Licensed Electrologist — Arizona state license; skin and follicle expertise
• ✦ Licensed Massage Therapist — Arizona state license; deep tissue and skin layer understanding
• ✦ Nue Conceal Certified — advanced paramedical camouflage technique by the founder of the method
• ✦ Active Practicing Paramedical Artist — full books in Scottsdale, treating clients weekly
• ✦ Founder, TGS Lab | TGS Lab Academy — Arizona State Conditionally Licensed by the Board for Private Postsecondary Education