The story below is from our July/August 2020 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
A paramedical tattoo artist restores women’s sense of self with needles and pigment — and a dose of compassion.
Jeneen Wilson had no tattoos. Nor had she ever wanted a tattoo.
But eight years ago, as her two teens moved out of the house, Wilson searched for something to give her days meaning. She had mothered her girls through dozens of moves and a dizzying list of deployments for her career-Army husband. She’d held jobs wherever they’d landed — as a property manager, an emergency medical technician, a medical coder. And she had painted since childhood. She was an artist at her core.
So when she heard of paramedical tattooing, the idea that she could use her gifts to bring cancer survivors, trauma victims and others a sense of beauty and positivity, she just couldn’t let it go.
She sought a top cosmetic tattoo artist in Florida and asked to apprentice with him. In 2017, she moved home to Christiansburg and opened her clinic, Primped 365.
Since then, paramedical tattooing — the use of needles and pigment to restore color to scarred tissue, to create a hyper-realistic image of a nipple on a reconstructed breast, to configure brows and lashes on a face that has lost all hair to disease—has soared in popularity and practice.
Wilson has grown along with the trend, updating her expertise and trying her hand at new challenges. She remains one of only dozens of permanent cosmetic tattoo artists in Virginia. Clients seek her from hours away, hearing of her artistry and her compassion by word of mouth and online.
“Anything I can do to make a woman feel better about herself and boost her self-confidence, I’m going to do it,” says Wilson, her no-nonsense manner softened by her soothing Southern lilt.
Looking back, it’s as if Wilson’s whole life led to this career.
She was born in Virginia but grew up in Northern California in the ’60s, her days unspooling in a series of encounters with local artists and the great outdoors.
At 13, her parents split, the little financial security her family had disintegrated, and she and her older brother coped as best they could. Wilson leaned in to her art to make sense of an imperfect world.
When she graduated high school, there was no money for college so she took the only path forward she could find: she joined the Army.
“For somebody who is a born creative, the Army is like being in prison. It’ll really shut you down,” Wilson remembers. “I just made the best of it.”
After basic and advanced training, she prepared to be sent to Italy. But her estranged father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Army stationed her there instead and she spent six months watching her father die.
“He never came out of the hospital,” she says. She spent months getting to know the disease and its victims. “That had an impact on me. Seeing cancer and death so closely.”
When it was time to ship out, she landed in Berlin. There, she met her husband, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and headed back to the States to start a family and the life of a military spouse.
Through North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Washington, DC, Iowa, and finally Virginia, she and her family bounced. She was their anchor.
And then, her girls were grown. Her husband had entered the private sector. It was Wilson’s turn to follow her dreams. She threw herself into her painting. But the canvas didn’t smile back.
When she discovered medical tattooing, Wilson says she found her calling.
“When I’m doing the art on a human, it affects their lives. I needed that human interaction.”
From the outside, Primped 365 is a tidy storefront in a nondescript strip mall. Inside, it’s a place of healing.
More doctor’s office than tattoo parlor, Wilson has created an oasis of calm. She plays soft music, diffuses essential oils and covers her clients in blankets to keep them warm. When she works, she, her client and a loved one are often the only people in the building.
From consultation to completion, an appointment can take up to three hours. Wilson tattoos eyebrows and eyeliner (for anyone, not just those with medical needs) and she fills in lighter colored scar tissue to turn it the shade of someone’s skin. She can remove unwanted tattoos with a technique faster and less painful than laser removal.
But her specialty is rendering life-like nipples for women who have had their breasts reconstructed after mastectomy. Wilson uses her skill to color and shade as if the blank reconfigured breast were a canvas and she the painter.
“After it was done, I looked up and was just amazed,” recalls Michelle Richardson, a client from early 2020 who had lost her breasts to cancer at the age of 43. “I felt complete. I had no idea I would feel that way.”
“I love being a part of that,” says Wilson, 54. “I love to share in these women’s joy. We cry together. At the end of every appointment, it’s hard for me to watch them walk out the door because we have formed a friendship.”
That is what keeps Wilson perfecting her techniques and searching for more ways to serve her clients. She’s added an extensive collection of high-quality wigs to Primped 365 for women who need them.
“It feels good when you’re contributing in the way that you can, making a difference in someone’s life,” she says.
To read more from our July/August 2020 issue, Subscribe Today. Thank you for supporting local journalism!