Krypt Crimson Publishing

Every Square Inch is a memoir about endurance, craft, and the long road to building a life inside one of the most gatekept worlds there is: tattooing. Beginning in a childhood marked by instability, emotional intensity, and a fierce need for escape, the book traces how creativity became both refuge and identity long before a real route into the trade was found.

Drawn to tattoos as a form of expression, control, and relief, the narrator spends years circling the dream — reading, practising, absorbing — until circumstance and courage finally align. After moving to Yorkshire and trying, unsuccessfully, to settle into a life that never quite fits, she is jolted back towards tattooing by the realisation that the safer, more acceptable paths on offer are leading her further away from herself. She secures a rare apprenticeship and enters a studio world she has long imagined from the outside.

When she eventually leaves the apprenticeship, the years that follow are fractured and demanding. She grieves, raises her children, survives a difficult home life, and works quietly to keep her place in tattooing alive — years of home tattooing, careful word-of-mouth work, private business planning, and persistence without recognition.

The second half of the memoir opens outward into the studio itself: its first premises, first clients, first year, and the world of human nature that passes through its doors. Working alongside her children, she finally opens the studio she has imagined for twenty years — built not just as a business, but as a place shaped by the lessons of everything that came before.

At its core, Every Square Inch is a story about refusing to abandon the thing that is truly yours. It is about surviving long enough to become ready for the life you were meant to build, and about discovering that belonging is not always something you find — sometimes it is something you create with your own hands.