We recently connected with Anne-Marie Guery and have shared our conversation below.

Anne-Marie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

The ability of taking risk has a central place in my career path. Before working abroad since 2015, I was running my own Tattoo shop in Paris. The business was good, and it was getting better everyday. But a part of me knew that it was not for me, I wanted to travel and discover new things. So many people tried to convince me to keep my shop and my life in France. But I knew I had to take a risk, or rather take a chance to find something else. Eversince, it has been risky all the way! I worked in so many countries, with so many situations. Everytime, I have to prove why I belong here, as a foreigner, as a woman, as an artist. Even today, I work and live in San Francisco. But everything depends on my ability to perform and convince new customers to trust me with their tattoo projects. The competition is hard in California, there are so many great artists. If you want to play it safe and being able to plan your next 2 years, that’s not the place to be!

Anne-Marie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am Mimi-Sama, a tattoo artist from France and established in the Bay Area at Black Serum Tattoo, San Francisco. Manga tattoo pieces are my main speciality. I love Japanese culture, so it’s a given that I tattoo a lot of panels and custom pieces based on manga. My interest in Japan grew even deeper as I lived and worked there for a year. So I incorporated more of that influence in my art and I started to offer tebori tattoo pieces. It’s hand-carved techniques for the filling of colors completed with the use of a tattoo machine for the lines. It’s the best combination of traditional and modern tattoo that I use to create custom designed pieces inspired by the Japanese pop culture.
In some if these pieces and others, I like to work with geometrical patterns to serve then main theme of the piece. I don’t come from an artistic background, and science has always been more appealing to me. It’s my way to translate that into my art.
A particular thing about me? I travelled in 30 countries and tattooed in more than half of them in 5 years. I inked people on 4 continents, not bad right?

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

“React, Adapt, Overcome!” In 2016, I was travelling in Asia for several months. After only 1 month for some reasons, I was not able to provide for my travel expenses until the end of my trip. So I had to decide if I was going back to France or try to find a solution. I spent a whole 24h making plans to find conventions and guests to sustain my travel while not going back home. So I changed destinations, cancelled some, extended others. Not everything went as planned but it was overall a success. And based on these experiences, I had even more opportunities afterward. So it was a good call, but it sure was scary and could have not worked. And after that was it. I just felt released from a lot fear, not all of it but enough to be able to act and decide with more freedom.

This episode shows how I chose to make the best out of this situation instead of conceding to the bad odds. Other times, I was not so lucky but in the end I always ended up learning something useful for later.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A lesson you learn as a beginning tattoo artist is you should not accept all the tattoo projects. Because of the location on the body, because of the customer motivations, because the style required etc. There are so many reasons! And I understand that, and don’t say you should tattoo everything. But several times, I had customers coming for a tattoo, and I really didn’t feel the project so I said no. And few months later, they come back to me to cover their new tattoo poorly done, the one I tried to discourage them to have. So at the end of day, you said no, the customer got tattooed anyway, and most of the time by someone who did not the best job possible. My belief is that everyone deserves a nice tattoo. And some of your clients and you might not have always the same taste, if you are able to give them what they want, you should. The good tattoo artists should do all they can to prevent people from getting bad tattoos.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mimisama.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mimi_sama.tattoo/