Tattoo Artist Plans to Make Her Mark in Coastal Leucadia

She looks more like a country girl than a tattoo artist--a cowgirl who feels more at home riding the rangelands of her native Oregon than in the rough-and-tumble urban back streets where the body painters ply their trade.

But that’s where Mary Anne Rose has spent much of the last 15 years--in too many nasty neighborhoods where it’s not exactly safe to walk alone at night, working in all-male tattoo parlors where the language isn’t always lady-like.

Now, however, the 45-year-old former nurse, a shy woman who wears ruby lipstick and a tiny tattoo of a rose on her lower stomach, says she’s become tired of the inner-city crime and the shady streetwise players who have made up her clientele for too many years.

She wants to tattoo a new image onto coastal North County suburbia.

Rose plans to leave a San Diego tattoo job to open her own parlor along a tree-shaded stretch of Highway 101 in Leucadia--to become the only such business to operate along the entire North County coast.

And cautious officials in Encinitas, a white-collar suburb of 50,000 residents with no current laws on the books to guide them in such routinely urban matters and whose jurisdiction includes Leucadia, say they plan to give her a tentative go-ahead.

Encinitas Planner Bill Weedman said the city plans to send a letter this week informing Rose that her business application for “Mary Rose’s Tattoo Gallery and Museum” has been approved.

“Because the city has no regulations prohibiting tattoo parlors, the advice I’ve received is that we can’t prohibit her from opening such a business,” Weedman said. “She’s protected in this case by her First Amendment rights under the Constitution.”

But officials aren’t exactly sitting easy with their decision. Tattoo parlors are as scarce as skyscrapers on the North County coast. Even Oceanside--the mecca for Marine Corps off-duty antics--phased out its tattoo parlors in the early 1970s.

Now, with the image of a new invasion of tattooists--and the customers they might attract--playing prominently on their minds, Encinitas officials are scrambling to research how other cities statewide regulate the parlors so they too can draft ordinances on such businesses.

“Right now, it looks as though Mary Rose is getting in under the deadline, so to speak,” Weedman said. “But we’re informing her that we’re doing more research into this. And if we decide to pass regulations, she would have to abide by them if she sought to expand her shop.

“But even if we pass any laws, it looks like she’d be allowed to continue operating as a nonconforming business.”

City Councilwoman Maura Wiegand is one city official who winces at the image of tattooed housewives and business professionals.

“I don’t want to sound like a snob, but I don’t think a tattoo parlor fits into the lifestyle of this community,” she said. “I believe in free enterprise, but I don’t think there’s any market for it here. And I think there’s going to be a strong reaction against it.”

Rose says she can understand the city’s anxiety over the potential opening of its first tattoo parlor. But her shop, she says, won’t be like the rest.

“The people who are cautious about letting me open--what they don’t want, I don’t want either,” she said. “I’m sick of the sleazy inner city, of people pushing their belongings around in shopping carts.

“I’ve worked in the downtown area and a lot of my customers don’t like to come there to get tattoos. They’re afraid. I just want to do nice clean drawings in a clinically clean setting in an atmosphere where people can be comfortable, where they don’t have to be afraid.”

Rose says that the reputation of tattoo artists has been tarnished by too broad a brush stroke in recent years. “There’s more women tattoo artists now than ever,” she said. “Many of them are trained artists. They’ve studied in college. This isn’t a line of work you necessarily picked up in prison.”

Rose learned the trade while working as a nurse in Portland in the mid-’70s, the night an emergency room technician invited her along while he got a tattoo.

She was a frustrated professional at the time, looking for a new direction. Growing up in the free-spirit ranch country of eastern Oregon, she didn’t take to the nonstop pressures of nursing.

There, in a downtown shop, Rose saw something that struck her as a perfect marriage between science and art. “I told myself, ‘I could do that.’ This tattoo artist had his own little surgery stall. And he was doing art.”

She sent away for a tattoo kit and started doing designs on friends part-time while she continued nursing. That was 1976. It took her a few years to realize that her work wasn’t any good, that she wasn’t growing as an artist.

So she gave up nursing to devote her energies full time to tattooing. And she moved around. Rose describes herself as a restless spirit, like the horses she likes to ride.

She worked for awhile in Seattle. And Nevada. And North Carolina. And Hawaii. And Texas. And San Diego. Over the years, she learned from other artists whose style she admired. She even let one of them tattoo a tiny rose on her stomach.

She traveled so much between Washington state, Oregon and California, she says, “I don’t even recognize the state boundaries anymore.” Finally, she decided to settle down in a place with a good climate. New Orleans was too humid. San Diego seemed like the place.

But once again, after a few months, the urban life began to wear on her. And she found her conservative style wasn’t always accepted in the loose-rolling world of many tattoo artists.

“I don’t exactly fit the bill of the tattoo artist,” she said. “That’s good for some customers who are relieved I don’t look like a drunken sailor. But it makes it hard for me to find a job sometimes. I don’t always fit in with the crew.”

Recently, Rose boarded a northbound train to check out downtown Oceanside. She found it less than to her liking. Too many bars and roustabouts--like a mini-downtown San Diego.

On the way home, though, she looked out the window as the train passed through tree-shaded Leucadia, a stretch of coastline dominated by a free-wheeling mix of funky art galleries, used car lots, antique and doughnut shops. “Suddenly,” she recalls, “a light went off in my head.”

She wrote city officials a letter, saying Leucadia seemed like the place she “could develop as an artist and a person.” It was close to the beach, close to Oceanside where so many potential Marine clients could be found, and close to the running of the horses in Del Mar.

It was not, however, love at first sight with Encinitas city officials, who initially informed Rose that she would have to pay $1,700 for “an adult business permit.”

To Rose, that meant sleazy adult bookstores, the kind of atmosphere she was trying to leave behind. “What I had in mind was something of a beauty salon with no more of a bite than getting your ears pierced.”

After a week of research, city officials relented and now say they plan to welcome Rose to Leucadia--sort of. “You have to understand, this was virgin turf for us,” Weedman said.

“We were worried about tattoos placed in anatomical areas, procedures that could be seen on the street--by kids or just about anyone else. She says she doesn’t do that kind of stuff.”

But city officials still worry. After all, this is a city of surf shops and poinsettia fields, not topless bars and dirty bookstores. And that’s the way city officials want it to stay.

Weedman said the public has 15 days to file objections to the planning department’s ruling on Rose’s shop--at which time the matter would go before the city council.

“That area of Leucadia just seems to attract a lot of non-mainstream businesses,” Weedman said. “This is just another one.”

Nearby businessmen agreed that the tattoo shop would not be out of place along the eclectic row of suburban shops.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Bob Wright, manager of San Diego Custom Trailers, which sits next door to the vacant shop Rose has her sights on. “I’ve got bikers in here all the time. People who live in trailers have tattoos all the time. Maybe we can trade customers. It makes sense to me.”

Rebecca Taylor, co-owner of nearby Chapman Mortgage and Real Estate, added: “Live and let live. Leucadia is funny like that. There’s a lot of artists here. What’s one more going to hurt?”

Anyway, Rose says she has some new designs--and techniques including toe and fingernail tattoos--she thinks might attract suburban professionals, surfers and, who knows, even housewives.

And at prices that begin at $20, , she’s confident she can make it along a commercial stretch that has seen dozens of businesses come and go in recent years.

“More people have tattoos today than you would ever dream--and still more want them,” she said. “I’ve done stockbrokers and lawyers and doctors before. One East Coast stockbroker got his toenail done so it wouldn’t show at the office.

“But he took his shoes off at every bar he drank at. He even sent a picture of his toe out on Christmas cards.”

Don’t worry, though, Mary Rose says she’s not going to open any yuppie tattoo shop. Not on her life.

“First and foremost, I’m a Marine Corps tattoo artist,” she says with a smile. “I’m a genuine cowgirl. And the first thing I do is take care of my boys.”