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**Holly Frye** (0:16)
Today, we are joined by someone who looked at the part of her body that the world told her to hide and decided that she would make it a canvas. She is an advocate, a community builder, and she has got lots of tattoos, so already near and dear to my heart. We will get into why that's important in our episode today. Our guest is the lovely Hannah Williams. Hannah has lived with psoriasis for years, and like a lot of our guests, she spent a long stretch of that time trying to make it disappear.
But somewhere along the line, that goal changed. She is building community around this simple, radical idea that you're allowed to feel at home in the body that you actually have, and you can decorate it however you want. Just incredibly brave and cool. And that is exactly why she is the perfect guest for today, because this episode is about the long road to liking and, dare I say, loving what you see in the mirror.
HANNAH, WELCOME TO OUR SKIN. WE ARE SO GLAD YOU'RE HERE.

**Hannah Williams** (1:17)
Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute honor, honestly.

**Holly Frye** (1:21)
I want to start out right out of the gate talking about something that I am very interested in talking about, which is your beautiful tattoos. I want to know how you got interested in having a tattoo yourself. Did you see someone with something that you just love? Did you have an idea of what you wanted for your first tattoo for a long time? There are so many ways that people get to that first tattoo, and I want to hear your story.

**Hannah Williams** (1:44)
I suppose I've always been someone that loved drawing. I loved drawing on myself as well, as I suppose most kids do.
But it was always something that I'd always come home from school, and my mom would be like, why are you still drawing on yourself? I'd be like, well, we can know. It's fun. My dad went to get a tattoo, and I remember going to the tattoo studio with him when he went to pick what he was getting and it was just seeing all the art on the walls. It was fun. It was great to see what type of different designs people would get. But I suppose another part of it is my aesthetic, is that I'm a little bit more gothy or emo, depending on where you want to put me, is that the music that I've listened to has always influenced me as well. Then people have always had tattoos. It's a fun way to express yourself in any way.

**Holly Frye** (2:34)
I agree. I want to also talk about, of course, another aspect of your skin.
You have been living with psoriasis for some time now. I would love to also talk about the beginning of that journey. You were really, really young when your first flare hit, and it was on your scalp, correct?

**Hannah Williams** (2:50)
Yeah. I was faced the felt it when I was 12 So what we thought was originally dandruff, and I tried all the shampoos and everything else that you can do to try and get rid of it, and it didn't shift.
So eventually got taken to the doctors and they said, psoriasis. So they did what they did and gave me all kinds of shampoos and everything else as well. And again, didn't really shift it. I remember being God, 12, 13, and having to pour cream on me head the night before going to school and having to get up super early to then wash it out again and having to repeat that process for so long for it then not to shift, and being so self-conscious that people would see what was going on and me not actually at the time having, I suppose, the words to actually understand what was going on.

**Holly Frye** (3:40)
And it didn't stay localized to your scalp. You have described that it covered close to 95 percent of your body.
You said once that you felt like you looked like a burn victim by the time you saw the dermatologist. This is an age where it's just hard to be a kid anyway. So what was it like living inside that body day to day as a teenager when this is really a time when so much is already about what you think people are perceiving how you're being seen?

**Hannah Williams** (4:09)
So yeah, by the time I had finally gone to a dermatologist, I was 16, so I was going to the doctor's pretty much every week.