Ink, Pins, and Cupcakes

A local artist shows her art in a unique fashion

Story and photo by Gabrielle Bilik

“I got my nipple done by you, do you remember?” asks the girl in the blue shirt.

The girl in the blue shirt smiles at the memory as her friend sits on the exam table with her tongue in the clamps. The pressure from the clamps is making her eyes water, or maybe it’s the sharp smell of antibacterial cleansers in the small room that’s making her eyes sting.

“Yeah…Yeah! I thought you looked familiar,” says the young woman holding the clamps.  Stepping over to the metal table in the corner of the room, she selects a small shiny needle from her array of stainless steel tools. It glistens underneath the giant, unshaded halogen lamp hanging about a foot over her head.

She takes the clamps with one gloved hand and glides the needle through the girl’s tongue.

“Real quick… Good job sweetie pie. You’re a drooler!” She slides a bell bar through the new hole and adjusts the metal ball at the end of it.

The girl stands up to face the mirror. After a moment of sticking her tongue out at herself she says, “It’s just big.”

“Yeah! You’re going to wake up tomorrow with a big ol’ tongue!” the woman says smiling and nodding. Then her voice becomes softer, “Are you feeling woozy, or dizzy?... Are you sure? We have water, and lollipops and stuff if you need it,” she gestures to a plastic black skull bowl resting on the counter,“…Are you sure? Ok well then let’s go over how to clean it.”

Carly Lamieux is a piercer at Body Art Tattoo and Piercing, on Margaret Street in downtown Plattsburgh. “There’s one other guy who does tattoos, and piercing, but I’m the only one who just does piercing,” she explains.

“She makes it a good time for people. She comforts them. She’s very welcoming; she goes about it with good humor,” says co-worker Todd Lamere.

"This is my favorite story to tell whenever conversation gets awkward, when I was eleven years old I was sitting on the bench at my baseball game, and I peed my pants."

 “I’ve been pierced by Carly three times, and every time I walk in there, she is always extremely friendly. I feel like I’m getting pierced by my friend down the street, not at a strict business. She always has great conversation, so there is no awkward conversation, but she still maintains a level of professionalism,” says Gina Gabriela Agnano, a PSU student. “Plus, it just seems like she genuinely enjoys her job.”

Lemieux’s bubbly personality leaves little room to lulls in conversation. “This is my favorite story to tell whenever conversation gets awkward, when I was eleven years old I was sitting on the bench at my baseball game, and I peed my pants. I was so scared but then it became my greatest day and it started to rain, so no one ever knew,” she says laughing.

Lemieux’s business card reads Carlovely, with a tough looking caricature printed on it as well as cupcakes in the background. The card represents her well, because her tattooed, pierced and seemingly tough exterior is always softened by something lovely, whether it is pigtails, or her always present smile, or some of her sweeter tattoos of hearts, cupcakes, and stars.

Lemieux is the only girl who works at the studio. She works with five guys all day, every day. “They’ve learned to deal with my tears, and working with them has made me tougher. You have to be when you’re the only girl.”

“You hid something in the plant?” She suddenly yells at co-worker Todd Lamere, who is standing on the balcony of the second floor.

“Yeah, I didn’t think he’d find it,” Lamere says, reaching up to put a Snickers bar on top of the wooden pole in the corner of the ceiling.

There is a loud thump. “...That was hollow.”

“Hiding food around the studio is routine, because our boss likes to eat whatever food is around if he is hungry, so Todd has to keep coming up with clever places to hide his snacks,” Carly says. Lamere has beef jerky in the plant as well as the Snickers bar that he has just dropped into the foundation of the building.  They playfully push each other out of the way as they search the closet downstairs for the Snickers bar. They’re giggling as they discover that the Snickers bar is nowhere to be found.

“Everyone who works here is super awesome, they’re all my best friends, and they’re my family,” Lemieux says.

As much as she loves her “family” here, she really misses her real family, living in Toronto.  She misses them so much that she has the word “homesick” tattooed across her knuckles.  “We were always at the rink. We all play hockey.” She especially misses her mom, who she is particularly close with. However, that wasn’t always the case.

“She’s my mumma,” she says smiling, “but you know, you go through a time when you just hate your parents…and think everything they say is wrong and that they’re mean …but she was right.”

“I was raised very open-minded, I wasn’t sheltered, which is another reason why I probably got into this subculture of…branding myself.”

In spite of her mother’s open-minded nature, their disagreements started after Lemieux’s first tattoo, which she got at fourteen, using an of-age friend’s I.D.

“Yeah, this senior lent me her I.D. and I actually took her thirteen year old brother with me and posed as his legal guardian, so he could get a tattoo too. He got a Transformers tattoo, and I got a Hanson tattoo,” she says laughing. “It’s really embarrassing; I didn’t even tell my husband what it actually was until we’d been dating for two months. When you’re fourteen, you think you’ll love stuff forever, but you won’t.”

Lemieux came to Plattsburgh to play hockey at Plattsburgh State when she was eighteen.  After two years there, she transferred to Clinton Community, but she still hasn’t gotten her degree because she’s missing one math class.

“I’m not going back. I mean, I don’t need it for my job, and I love my job and I know I will be in this profession forever, whether it be piercing or owning my own shop,” she says.

She began piercing during her last year of college. She was constantly in the shop because she had friends that worked there. When her friend Travis left, there was a position that needed to be filled. “So he called me one day and asked if I’d be interested in piercing. I learned mostly through practice and within a few weeks I was piercing on my own, and I’ve been doing it ever since then,” Lemieux says.

Body Art Tattoo and Piercing is open from noon until 10 p.m. Lemieux’s work day usually starts around 11 a.m. and from then on she is busy. “I’m very obsessive-compulsive about my routine in the morning,” she says. “I wake up every morning at 11:11, have a diet coke, smoke a cigarette, shower, and then it’s work time. I usually get to the store first.  I open shop, turn the lights on, set up my room, pick the store music, and just set the tone of the day. I make sure my tools are clean and that the store is stocked. I answer the phone and make appointments, and check my blog.”

"You can’t just say ‘ew’ and run out of the room. You just throw on a surgical mask and hold your breath."

Such a strict routine doesn’t mean that her work is boring. Every day is different because she sees such a lot of different people at the shop. “A lot of crazy people come in here,” says Lemieux.  She continues to describe an instance when a man wandered in from the Krazy Horse Saloon, which is right next door for Body Art, and, obviously intoxicated, said, “I wanna git America on my butt.” 

“We knew he was drunk, and we would never tattoo someone who was so visibly wasted, but we just decided to mess with him,” Lemieux says. “We told him it would be six hundred dollars. He slammed six hundred dollars, in cash, down on the counter.” As far as piercings go, Lemieux has had some odd requests. “I once pierced someone’s butt crack,” she says smiling.

The job also has its challenges. “Some people just aren’t very hygienic,” Lemieux explains. “Especially when it comes to mouth and genital piercings, you have to deal with it though; you can't just say “ew” and run out of the room. You just throw on a surgical mask and hold your breath.”

Lemieux loves her work, and her favorite part about her job is making her customers happy. “It’s really rewarding when people love their piercing, especially if they were really nervous to get it.”

“For a lot of people, I think getting a piercing is a release,” Lemieux says. “For me it’s such a release to do a piercing, or to get a tattoo. If I’m feeling bad and I have a piercing to do, I feel so much better afterwards,” she explains. “I also think for a lot of people they get piercings as a fashion statement.”

She screws the ball onto the end of a boy’s new lip ring. “Good job! Are you feeling ok?” The tall boy slowly gets up from the table and waves off the concerned look on his mother’s face. “I’m fine,” he says.

They leave and a group of giggling college girls wander into the shop.

Lemieux rubs her hands together and giggles. “Who’s my next victim?”

How do you feel about piercings and tattoos? Do you have any of your own?