Tucked away in her two-room studio in Barrio Viejo, tattoo artist Karolina Tumilowicz creates illustrative tattoo designs that seem straight out of a fantasy book.
The inside of The Doe’s Den, 487 S. Meyer Ave., is an eclectic mix — like her art — of abstract and vintage, filled with antique furnishings, trinkets and oddities Tumilowicz has thrifted over the years.
Nearly every surface in each room is covered with some new delightful curiosity, everything from metal animal figurines and vintage books to bouquets of dried flowers and antique bird cages. A glass case of butterflies, a crystal ball, and several bronze vases sit on a wooden chest in the center of the parlor room, and high above it all, on a top shelf, perches a taxidermy raccoon, affectionately called “Mr. Struggles.”
Tattooist and artist Karolina Tumilowicz adds to a large tattoo for one of her regulars, Erika Taylor, in her shop/studio space, The Doe's Den.
“I like to surround myself with whimsy,” Tumilowicz said. “I'm the kind of person that if there's a weird, random thrift store, I'm like, ‘pull over.’ That's where you find the weird stuff, and for me, the weirder, the better. If it's haunted, it's coming home with me.”
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She jokingly referred to her decor style as “medieval grandma.”
“This is my little cozy cave, as I like to call it,” Tumilowicz said. “I want it to feel like you're coming into someone's living room when you are here.”
Tumilowicz has been working out of her shop in a quiet part of downtown for about a year and a half, specializing in illustrative tattoos, and much of her work depicts floral and botanical arrangements, mystical critters, and desert cactuses.
“I love to find inspiration in everything, even my little trinkets and stuff,” Tumilowicz said. “I just think that everything is so whimsical, especially older stuff.”
Some of her favorite things to tattoo are desert landscapes, plants and wildlife. She also gets a lot of her inspiration for her more fairytale-like pieces from old folk illustrations.
Karolina Tumilowicz puts in some time working on an oil painting in her shop/studio space.
“I have a lot of these old books that are from the early 1900s,” Tumilowicz said. “They have all these cute little illustrations.”
Tumilowicz spends countless hours each week creating her imaginative tattoo designs.
“If you asked my friends and my partner, they would tell you that I'm probably drawing more often than I'm not. I have a notebook with me everywhere I go,” she said. “I can spend hours drawing and I don't even know that hours have passed.”
After years of tattooing, drawing has become its own kind of ritual for her, Tumilowicz said.
“I'll collect my drink, I'll collect my books, my little trinkets, and (think) ‘okay, what's speaking to me?,’” she said.
Tumilowicz started her artistic career as a painting and drawing major at the University of Arizona but found her way into tattooing just over five years ago. Many of her paintings are displayed on the walls of the shop, including more abstract pieces like one depicting a coyote skull, and a red and blue piece featuring scissors, a chair and a hand.
“I'm predominantly a tattoo artist, but I was an abstract painter first,” she said. “I became a tattoo artist later in life, during COVID-19.”
A section of wall is adorned with the designs tattooist Karolina Tumilowicz has made and used in her shop/studio space.
Her journey into tattooing, Tumilowicz said, began when she was a teenager, getting her own tattoos.
“I started getting tattooed when I was 18, and it felt like a really empowering thing for me to get tattoos, and they made me feel better about myself and my skin,” she said. “So it was always on the back burner. People would always say ‘oh, your art would make cool tattoos,’ but it was a different time, and I didn't really think about going into it and pursuing it.”
It wasn’t until 2020, after working at nonprofits for a number of years, that she felt called back to making art.
“Like everybody else, I felt like ‘oh my gosh, what am I doing?’” she said. “So I took that time to really decide, ‘you know what, I want to be an artist, and I know it's going to be kind of crazy and it's going to be haphazard, but I'm going to do it.’”
That was when she found a Craigslist ad online of a local tattoo shop looking for an apprentice and decided to go for it.
Karolina Tumilowicz works on one of her current oil pieces in her shop/studio spa, The Doe's Den.
What she has come to love about being a tattoo artist, she said, is providing a comforting, empowering experience for her clients and creating a piece of art that they will hopefully love forever.
“Once I started doing it, I really did realize how empowering it is for people, and the experience and the bond that tattooing gives to people,” Tumilowicz said. “It's special, you're tied to the person that gave you that tattoo forever.”
Some clients, she said, love her pieces enough to choose a design from her flash sheet or other pieces she’s already drawn.
“There's definitely that school of people that are, ‘I love that, and I just want that on my body,’ and it speaks to them,” Tumilowicz said.
Many clients come in for tattoos because they want a custom piece of art in her style.
Karolina Tumilowicz gets close to her piece, waiting on one of her oil pieces after finishing her tattoo work for the afternoon.
“That can be as simple as someone wanting something silly and small on a whim, or as serious as someone getting a memorial piece for someone or for something,” Tumilowicz said. “Sometimes folks come to me with something really specific. I've been doing a lot of memorial pieces for pets, which have been super sweet.”
In the back of her shop is a wall of hundreds of her past designs, inked onto tracing paper and taped together like a tattoo mural. For many of them, she can still remember the story behind the piece — a surprise for a long-distance friend visiting town, or an old sketch someone found on her Instagram, for example.
Tattooist and artist Karolina Tumilowicz adds second skin to the work she's doing for Erika Taylor.
“I think that's the cool thing about being a tattoo artist,” she said. “I feel so lucky that I get to draw every day, and I get to draw things for people that bring them joy.”
As she approaches two years with The Doe’s Den, Tumilowicz said one of the ways she wants her shop to grow going forward is adding more artists to the space and passing on her knowledge of the craft.
“I always play around with the idea of having guest artists in here,” she said. “It's not easy finding an apprenticeship, or finding someone that you really get along with to spend that much time with, and have a relationship with, so when I got into tattooing, I thought it would be really great one day to be able to share this with people.”
She recently hosted the first art class in her studio. Tumilowicz and visiting artist Michaela Dannenbrink led a pen and ink watercolor painting and drawing class.
