Kayla Costa
Kayla Costa is a 25 year old Tattoo Artist and mother. She was born in Hawaii and is currently located in Sonoma County, California.
Kayla has been a Tattoo Artist for seven years and has been a self taught artist and creative her entire life. Through her childhood, her artistic nature was nurtured by her Japanese grandmother, an artist in her own right. Today Kayla draws inspiration from artists like Alphonse Mucha, William-Adolphe Bouguereau and John William Waterhouse as well as Tattoo Artists such as Hannah Flowers, Horitomo and Jay Joree. Kayla has been fascinated by tattoo culture since the age of eight, when her mothers friend came over with a large black out tattoo that he was healing at the time. It was that encounter that inspired Kayla to add tattoos to her personal studies of the arts. As she grew older and started reviewing her career choices it became clear to Kayla that she wanted to pursue something in the arts. In 2015 Kayla suffered the loss of her home, community and job in the Valley Wildfire at the age of 17. This caused her life to take a dramatic turn. This would be when kayla started thinking about the what her long term professional goals were. “It took a while to figure out what I wanted to do in life, but one day I realized that the only art form Ive never stopped being fascinated with was Tattooing…It became pretty clear then…” Kayla started her Tattoo Apprenticeship late into her 18th year of life when a family friend and fellow professional agreed to apprentice her. Kayla’s mentor, being a family friend, had a good understanding of Kayla’s art and Kayla was able to apprentice although her portfolio had burned; a rare opportunity. Being Hawaiian and Japanese, Kayla soon found an unexpected and profound connection to her ancestry through her continued study of ancient traditional Hawaiian (Kakau) and Japanese (Irezumi) tattooing. Kaylas long term goal for her career is to educate the world on safe and professional body modification so that she can change the industry and hold the community to a safer and more accepting standard. When her son is an adult she plans to travel the world receiving traditional style tattoos from multiple cultures and eventually study with either a Hawaiian or Japanese traditional Tattoo Artist. |
Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
-Nietzsche