We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cei Lambert a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Cei, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I learned the term “hybrid professional” in 2019— almost five years into a career I did not go to school for and two years after opening my own consulting business. At the time I was working in public health and was beginning my journey as a tattoo artist two days a week. I consulted regularly with a myriad of clients, advising them on how to build a diverse and inclusive workplace. I attended a Ted talk given by Dr. Sarahbeth Berk where she introduced the idea of how some people have multiple jobs/roles/careers, and that rather than juggling disparate jobs, the hybrid professional sees how every role integrates and mutually reinforces all the others. As I began to develop Meadowlark Tattoo, this idea stayed in the forefront of my mind.

It’s 2020. I am working in a tattoo shop with fantastic artists and good people, but where the legacy of sexism and racism that dominate US tattoo culture are still very much present. My other two jobs are hugely focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I begin to write and post about my own philosophy as a tattoo artist: that tattoos are collaborations, that tattoos can be transformative and healing, that tattoos are for all bodies and all skin, that tattoos should be showcased on real bodies, not touched up and whitewashed “canvases”. My views and posts are not well received by the shop where I work, and in conjunction with the financial disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am asked to leave.

I have already hired my replacement at the clinic where I am a project manager for the training and education division.
I have already made a plan to go “full time” with tattooing in one month.
I have dramatically cut down on my consulting gigs to make room for this job.
And now the job is gone.

Or so I thought. For about a week.

As I look at my options I realize that there really aren’t many. I am highly educated but there are not many jobs in my field. It’s the pandemic and no one has room in their budget to hire a consultant right now. It’s the pandemic and everyone is tightening their belts and getting ready for who-knows-what to happen next.
The great thing about not having any options is that you have to create your own.
In June 2020 I began looking for space to rent. In July 2020 I found a space in a beautiful spa building. In August 2020 I opened Meadowlark Tattoo and on August 2, 2020 I tattooed my first client in my own studio under my own business banner.

I made a plan that gave me six months to make the business work. I made a profit the very first month I was open. Since then the business has never been unprofitable. I began with a strong and clearly articulated values statement, and I began to apply what I had learned about trauma informed care in medicine to tattooing. I began to gain a following of clients looking for a different and more affirming tattoo experience.

There are three major things that make Meadowlark Tattoo successful:

1. I manage it like a business. Many tattoo artists and tattoo shop owners are phenomenal at their craft, but they do not take the time to learn how to manage the business. Before opening I made sure I knew what all my assets were worth. I had clear records of what I had invested to get the business off the ground and therefore what I would need to make back before I would begin to turn a profit. I made sure the legal paperwork was all in order and made a plan for how to manage my profit and loss and to track trends and changes. I did market research and set my price to be competitive in my area and industry. I created key performance indicators to help me understand how the business was performing across all metrics, and to track these metrics over time. On any given day I am drawing tattoos, tattooing clients, and doing marketing, financial management, and planning for the future.

2. I am a values forward, values first business; I do not compromise my values for any reason. At Meadowlark Tattoo I believe that all people are worthy, that all bodies are beautiful, that tattoos are for everyone, and that each person deserves to be treated with individualized care and attention. I am outspoken about the bigotry that clients often face in tattoo studios and strive to be a safe place where anyone and everyone can feel seen and respected. I have been told over and over that clients choose me because of these values and because they feel safe at Meadowlark Tattoo.

3. I allow my other work to make Meadowlark Tattoo better. As an adjunct professor of art I have the opportunity to learn from my students and understand what is visually interesting to them and to get outside of my comfort zone. As a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant I am always practicing how to make everyone in a room feel heard and valued, and I am always pushing myself to learn more about how to combat systemic oppression wherever I find it.

I always remember that I am a hybrid professional and that all my work is really one job: the job of acknowledging and celebrating the identities of others.

As of this interview, Meadowlark Tattoo is thriving and growing. I have a new location filled with plants and bright pictures. I have clients who have been coming to me for over three years. I am grateful every day that I get to do something I love, and that what I love to do has the ability to uplift, support, and care for people in a deep and lasting way.

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 background and context?

My name is Cei (pronounced “Kay”– it’s ancient Welsh) and I am a tattoo artist, college art professor, and diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant. I call myself a hybrid professional because I see each of my jobs as part of a larger career whose purpose is to support and affirm people’s identities, and to help people who have been hurt by oppression and discrimination to heal.

I was supposed to be a veterinarian. Ask baby Cei from age 3 to age 18 what he’s going to be when he grows up and he’d say “veterinarian”. I was a biology nerd in high school, and I also took every art class that was offered. I got to college and declared my biology major and pre-vet focus. Within a year I had added an art major, and by the time I graduated I was more focused on art than on vet med. I decided to return to school for my Masters in Fine Art with the goal of being a working artist and art educator.

As it turns out, working in the arts isn’t so much “I’m going to apply for and get a job” as it is “I am going to need to create a job for myself”. I worked in public health and diversity, equity, and inclusion for five years while I tried to figure out how to make a career in art. Fortunately for me, my spouse pursued a business degree and I looked over her shoulder and was able to learn a lot, including that you don’t actually have to have someone else employ you–you can do it yourself! I had heard of entrepreneurship of course, but it wasn’t until a few years after graduate school that I realized I could be an entrepreneur.

In 2020 I opened Meadowlark Tattoo as a private and custom-only tattoo practice focused on illustrative and nature based tattoos, and further focused on the human element of tattooing. Meadowlark Tattoo is values focused and values forward, with a particular focus on creating a safe and welcoming space for people who may have found tattoo spaces to be sexist, racist, bullying, and uncaring. I believe that getting a tattoo can be a transformative experience for both client and artist, and that such an experience deserves care, patience, and a willingness to truly work with each person as an individual. I took elements of what I learned about trauma informed care in the medical space and have applied these approaches to tattooing with excellent results. Most of my clients say that they chose Meadowlark Tattoo because they felt safe and cared about. I am a great tattoo artist, but it is the culture of my studio that sets me apart as well as my ability to connect my other work with my tattoo practice.

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

I was raised to believe that a person should have one passion that leads to one program of study that leads to one terminal degree that leads to one career in one field (and that field should probably be medicine or law or similar). I tried to fit this mold for a very long time, with very little success. No matter how hard I focused on something, I was still interested enough in dozens of other areas that I could never stay on just one track.

I’ve realized that the brain is far more plastic than we’re told, and that learning is constant. I learn new things all the time. I go back and relearn old lessons afresh and every time I do so I gain new insight.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I funded my business entirely myself. By working other jobs while starting to grow my client base and practice I was able to save enough to buy my own equipment, rent my space, and pay for my marketing and startup costs. I am not a large business– I am a sole-proprietorship and the entire thing is me, myself, and I. I was able to be self funded because I carefully estimated the size of business that I wanted to run and did not try to create something larger than I needed or wanted. As I was setting up the finances for the business I also ran a few experiments: one was to see the potential return-on-investment of applying for jobs (and ideally getting one) versus the startup investment of creating my own job. I looked at my job application track history and an interesting reality became clear: even though I am a highly educated and highly qualified person with a good work history and excellent references and all the rest, I have never once gotten a job by applying through the traditional avenues. When I moved to Boston after graduate school I applied to over 400 jobs, got two call backs, and zero job offers. When I moved back to Colorado I applied to dozens of jobs and never heard back at all. I am a thorough person and each job application I submitted took at least an hour and it’s safe to assume that from 2014-2020 I spent over a thousand hours applying for work. My return-on-investment for applying for “traditional” work is $0 (you could even argue that it’s a negative number given the expenses associated with sending out applications, traveling for interviews, working with employment consultants, and so on). My return-on-investment for creating my own job is hundreds of thousands of dollars. If I had invested the thousands of hours I spent throwing job applications into the void and worked on my business instead, I would have hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.meadowlarktattoo.com
• Instagram: @meadowlark.tattoo
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meadowlarktattoo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceialambert/
• Other: https://g.page/meadowlark-tattoo?share