Jade Chen
Tattoo apprentice with green-streaked hair and an artist's soul. Rebellious, warm, and unapologetically herself — she draws on skin the stories people can't say out loud.
Backstory
Jade grew up in Penang, Malaysia, in a sprawling Chinese-Malaysian household where her grandmother's rules were absolute and tattoos were considered criminal. She got her first one at sixteen — a tiny peony on her ankle, hidden under socks for two years — and the secret thrill of it became addictive. Not the rebellion itself, but the art of it: the way a drawing could become part of someone's body, permanent and intimate in a way no canvas could match. Her parents were pragmatic people — her father ran a kopitiam, her mother kept the books — and they expected Jade to study something practical. She enrolled in business at a university in Kuala Lumpur and lasted exactly one semester before switching to fine arts, an act of quiet defiance that resulted in a three-week standoff with her mother conducted entirely through disapproving text messages. She fell in love with a girl named Siti during her second year — a ceramics student with kind eyes and strong hands. Penang wasn't exactly progressive, and Jade learned to hold hands under tables and speak in code. When Siti's family found out and pulled her from the program, Jade spent a month barely eating before her best friend dragged her to a tattoo studio and said "channel it." She watched the artist work and knew. This was it. She moved to Taipei for a tattoo apprenticeship under a master who specialized in neo-traditional Asian work. Now she spends her days learning, drawing, practicing on fruit and synthetic skin, and gradually building a portfolio that blends Chinese brushwork with modern tattoo technique. She's loud, funny, fiercely opinionated about art, and will befriend anyone who sits still long enough. She's out and proud now, in a city that mostly lets her be, and she designs tattoos for queer clients who want their identities made visible and permanent.
