We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mariel + Sai Bayona + Li . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mariel + Sai below.

Mariel + Sai, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

We took a huge risk opening our Tattoo Studio because we signed our lease to our space– literally– two weeks before the first lockdown in San Francisco due to the pandemic of COVID19.

As everyone knows, opening a business is not easy since it requires the founders to invest everything they have to build the idea, the dream. We must say that, taking the risk of building a business at the start and during a global pandemic has been one of the riskiest endeavors we have come across. It was terrifying not knowing when we were going to be able to actually open our business, and start tattooing in the new space. Even more so, the unknown of how the world was going to change due to the disease. We ended up waiting almost an entire year to start our business.

Luckily, we are fortunate to be a good team, work together, and prepare the best we can and support each other during those bizarre and ambiguous times. We overcame many obstacles along the way, some indoor floods, an (what it felt like at the time) endless lockdown, and overcoming all the meticulous steps to open a business in the tattoo industry. Most importantly: the constant doubting if it was a good idea to risk all we had throughout a global pandemic.

We can say it was so worth the risk!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Tattoo artists: Mariel Bayona & Sai Li. Founders of Mono Moon, a private tattoo studio in San Francisco <3

We both have a similar story. Sai was born and raised in China and Mariel grew up in Mexico. We ended up in San Francisco in the pursue of our Masters Degree in Fine Art at the San Francisco Art Institute where we met around 2013-14.

After graduating we sort of did our own thing. Throughout the following 4 years we both coincided with the experience of trying to make a living in San Francisco while maintaining an art practice, and juggling with multiple jobs at the same time. This exposure led both of us to make the shift into tattooing and start the search for a tattoo apprenticeship. For which, Sai stayed in San Francisco, and Mariel moved to Mexico City.

Please keep in mind that all of this happened independently to each of us without having much contact with each other. We find it pretty interesting how we have coincided in a similar path. However, each with our set of challenges, and lessons along the way.

Coming from a fine art into tattooing gave both of us the opportunity to understand the fundamentals of a tattoo practice, and to respect the medium of the human skin. We both come from a strong and creative ethic that helped us to continue exploring our artistic concepts into a tattoo form. Mariel leans on expressing her interests of fascination and awe through the analogy of fantastic animalia, mythology, and botanica; while Sai explores the depths of human nature directly through figurative, female, anime/manga themes to embrace her inner nerd.

In 2019 we both started tattooing in different tattoo shops located in San Francisco’s Mission District, where we reconnected and started meeting every Wednesday to chat about tattooing and art. Then is when Mono Moon was founded.

Mono Moon is a Women of Color owned business. We include & welcome everyone and keep our studio as a safe and protected environment to all. We celebrate & support women entrepreneurs and artists that thrive in a white man dominated culture. Mono Moon also opens it’s doors to artists all over the world who would like to have a space to tattoo in San Francisco.

In Mono Moon, our main focus is for the client to have a personal experience with their artist with high quality tattoos.
For Sai, even though her work consists on manga and anime, she dives into making every piece perfectly fitted into the clients preferred placement even if it takes altering the border, adding elements into the design or vice versa. Li applies her deep understanding of realism to fit on all skin tones so the client will always have a beautiful healed result.
Mariel has custom tattoos as her main focus. She specializes mainly in “building your own” fantastic creature, or as she calls them, “Tescuani”. She gives her clients the experience to have a fully custom tattoo. She would even free hand draw most of the stenciling process in order for the piece follow the client’s body organically.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Fun Fact: As mentioned, we met in grad school. However, we also worked together at the admissions office at San Francisco Art Institute. Mariel was Sai’s boss for a while and got to hang out a lot at the admissions office.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

It resonates with both of us that there’s no better marketing than “word of mouth”. Even though we use social media as our main outlet to put ourselves and our work out there to attract clients. We both are fortunate enough to be recommended through our client’s experience directly and continue to have frequent clients that come back for a tattoo.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.monomoonsf.com
• Instagram: monomoontattoo
• Other: Google Business: Mono Moon *Mariel Bayona Instagram: bymaba www.marielbayona.com *Sai Li Instagram: saili_ink www.saili.me

Image Credits
Artist shot by Fernando Godinez.