Julia Lenoir has lived many lives. In 2022, she was working in hospice and tattooing herself casually, learning to draw botanical designs by tracing: “I started doing everything in dots, because I couldn’t pull lines on my machine. I would sit with my tracing paper over the image, and I would just dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.”
By April of 2022, she was tattooing full time. While running her own studio that grew to have 11 resident artists and three rotating guest benches (now closed – she says “it was taking over my life”), she picked up jewelry-making, teaching herself how to solder from YouTube and Instagram Reels. It was literal trial by fire: “I’ve cooked opals, like hundreds of dollars worth of opals. It was a moment that I almost didn’t come back from, like, how could I be so reckless?”
Come back she did, now making a living splitting her time between silversmithing and tattooing, and even picking up knife-making in February of this year. Lenoir’s willingness to try new things results in an explosive creative output, but her determination is what makes it a full-time job: “I really needed a break from working in hospice, because it’s so taxing,” she says. “It’s one of the most rewarding jobs, but it is so physically and spiritually taxing; so I was like, I have to make this work.”
That scrappiness was honed through a hard period of addiction in her early 20s. “I think the capacity in which I was in survival mode for as long as I was, I had to build up this very specific skill set. I harnessed a lot of energy, and I was very calculated,” Lenoir says. “So by the time I got sober, that energy didn’t go anywhere. I’m able to funnel all of that into something very positive.”
Lenoir describes her work as function-first: “I’m very utility-oriented. When I’m making knives, I’m like, this knife is badass, but is it functional? Or, these earrings are really cool, but they’re super spiky. Are they going to be comfortable?”
She manages to combine that utility with a kind of elemental, organic sensibility to her swirling, overlapping orchid tattoos and ornate silver rings. “I am a naturalist at heart. I hike a lot. I love learning about the natural world,” she says. The orchids have a mysterious synchronicity as well: “I sent a picture of it to my mom. She was like, that’s really interesting, because my mother was a chemist, and she studied orchids. She had an orchid greenhouse and would go to South America and poach them and bring them back – which is totally illegal.”
Lenoir’s ideas seem to spring from a mysterious well that she doesn’t have to try to access – but she urges that it takes courage. “I want to inspire people to be able to take that liberty in their own lives, to create,” she says. “I didn’t come from a family of creatives, I don’t have the financial backing to do any of the things that I do. I want to show people, you can start at the very, very beginning and have absolutely no skill set. I love [Rainer Maria] Rilke. He has this whole essay on being a beginner. It’s all about being able to stay at the beginning. That’s where we are most ourselves.”
To book a tattoo, shop silver jewelry, or commission a knife for the hard-edged naturalist in your life, DM @ilovegigi222 on Instagram.
Meet Your Makers
In the Elements With Ceramicist Arielle Shaves
For an Herbal Cigarette Maker, “Heritage Brands” Are the Aesthetic Inspiration
AV Beamon’s Mind-Mend Connection
Emma Hollingsworth’s Labor of Love (Emphasis on Love)
This article appears in December 12 • 2025.