What Tattoos Teach Us About Confidence, Beauty & Self-Expression | Gia Rose

**Anna McBride** (0:02)
Welcome back to SHE Asked, Tools for Practical Hope, the podcast where we explore healing, creativity, spirituality, and the deeper stories that shape who we become. I'm your host, Anna McBride, therapist, coach, storyteller, and someone who believes that healing is not linear. Sometimes it comes through grief, sometimes through relationships, sometimes through spirituality, and sometimes through art. Through my coaching work, retreats, workshops, and this podcast particularly, I support women navigating major life transitions and reconnecting to themselves in deeper, more authentic embodied ways.
If you're looking for deeper support in your own healing journey, you can learn more about all that I offer at annamcbride.com. Today's conversation feels incredibly special because we're gonna be exploring the intersection of artistry, spirituality, identity, ritual, and the human body itself. Today, I'm joined by Gia Rose, artist, tattoo artist, and the creator of deeply intentional tattoo experiences that often feel as emotional and transformative as they do aesthetic. Gia, welcome to SHE Asked.
As always on this show, we like to begin with a story. Gia, please take us back to the beginning. What first drew you to art, tattooing, and eventually creating tattoo experiences that feel so intuitive, spiritual, and emotionally intentional?

**Gia Rose** (2:06)
Okay. So yeah, 23 years of tattooing is what I've been doing. And back when I started, it really was still very counterculture and taboo, not something people really pursued. I'd never heard of it. I fell into it. I was right place, right time, and the woman that taught me was a woman. I was a very spiritual and intentional tattooer.
And so I kind of had that integration very early on in my apprenticeship, and tattooing is an apprenticeship-based trade, unlike a lot of other arts. It's very unique. It's a whole thing of its own self. And she had this other aspect to it that I learned under. And then when I left her umbrella after a year, I was sort of into the world of tattooing in industry and realized very quickly how rare that was. I never really come full circle back around to it until more recently within my work, which has evolved naturally over the course of my career, geared more towards what I like to call intuitive tattooing, where was an offshoot of creating my own style and spending a lot of time honing that. And then the type of clients that would come to me just evolved in this way, where the way I work is they give me ideas, stories, memories, things that are important to them. A lot of the majority of people I tattoo are women and a lot of archetypal imagery.
And then I go with it for the aesthetic and the illustration and the tattoo aspect of it. So someone can give me a lot of feelings or a vibe or an archetype or a moment in their life. And then I come up with the imagery that represents everything that they need, but it's not a literal translation. So it's a lot more metaphorical, intuitive from everything from the palettes to the actual imagery, to the designs, to the size, to the placement. And that's something that we kind of collaborate with on for that tattoo and it's a pretty powerful way to move throughout the world.

**Anna McBride** (4:12)
Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. Your story is so amazing because often we will fall into opportunities and not know where it's going to take us.

**Gia Rose** (4:24)
No, I had no idea.

**Anna McBride** (4:26)
Yeah. And here you are 23 years later, intuitively guided, creating the expressions.

**Gia Rose** (4:35)
And I've been very lucky in my career. I've been right time, right place, in the right moments as tattooing has evolved. I've been able to create my own pigments for one of the biggest color companies in the world for tattooers. And I've been able to make stamp sets for other artists through Procreate. And I've been able to teach and big stages and small stages and do shows. And it's just all picking up the doors that were open for me and just seeing where everything went.

**Anna McBride** (5:05)
Yeah. Wow. That's incredible. To me, that sounds like alignment. You're in alignment with what you're meant to be doing. So incredible. I hope so.
What was your relationship with art growing up?

**Gia Rose** (5:20)
I actually hated it. I never wanted to be an artist.
I think it's because my parents really pushed me to. I'm the middle of five children and I was raised by, I like to call intellectual hippies. And they really pushed my artistic and creativity in that way. And we were, as children, we're all, we all have our own thing. And they kind of pushed us each in our own directions. And I don't say pushed as more as fostered. Every birthday or holiday, my gifts were always art supplies. Never asked for them.