REP YOUR ’HOOD

Ashley Dootson knew she wanted to be tattooed from the time she was a little kid.

Her mother had a heavily tattooed friend, and young Ashley was obsessed with him.

She got her first tattoo, a little star on her foot, with her mom’s permission at 17.

“She thought I would hate it,” Dootson says. But it opened the door to a lifelong commitment to tattoos and now, at 34, Dootson’s skin is covered in art.

The hairstylist waited until her late 20s, after her career had been established, before she started getting highly visible tattoos. All of her ink can be covered by long sleeves and pants.

“It’s funny when my clients meet me in the winter, and then they see me in summer, and they’re like, ‘Oh…’ ” she says.

She has tattoos for the people who inspire her, like her grandmother, Peg Bundy and Dolly Parton. She has portraits of her dogs. She has tattoos purely for beauty, such as the blackand-white roses on her right knee. She collects tattoos from artists she admires — Jeff Brown, Will Card and Sal Trevino among them.

She has a couple of “dumb” tattoos from her younger days, and one is the result of letting an aspiring tattoo artist practice on her.

But they’re all a part of her, she says.

“They’re beautiful to look at,” she says. “It’s art you can wear. I feel prettier with them.”

Unfortunately, not everyone thinks tattoos are beautiful, and rude strangers have let Dootson know what they think. A man once asked her why she would want to make herself look ugly, for example. Sometimes strangers touch her because of her tattoos. Once, a man tried to lift up her skirt in Kroger to see more of her tattoos. She argued with him and fled the store without buying anything.

“Sometimes I feel like a novelty,” she says. “People are always very curious.”

Dootson has “817” tattooed on one arm because she’s from Bedford. But she has worked in Oak Cliff for seven years, and she bought a house here two years ago.

So she decided to get “Oak Cliff” on her foot. Artist Caleb Barnard at Electric Eye had a friend draw the stencil in Venice Beach-style lettering, and he tattooed it.

Barnard and his partner, Marie Sena, opened their tiny shop at the rear of Jefferson

Tower in June. Barnard has been tattooing for about 16 years and Sena for about 10. The couple lives in East Dallas, but they both worked at Saints and Sinners in the Bishop Arts District for several years.

“We love the neighborhood, and we love this building,” Sena says. “It’s so cool to be part of this historic building and what’s going on over here.”

Julie McCullough wanted a Texas tattoo. When the fashion designer had a storefront in Bishop Arts, she noticed her friend who worked at Hunky’s, Samuel Stuard, had the Texas Theatre marquee on one arm.

The historic theater/art-house cinema/ dive bar had become her favorite neighborhood hangout.

So she and her Texas Theatre buddy, Lindsay Naccarato, decided to get Texas Theatre tattoos too. They hired Ejay, aka Ernesto Bernal, at Saints and Sinners in Bishop Arts for the work.

“He’s incredibly talented,” Naccarato says. She has about 50 tattoos, and Ejay did most of them.

Naccarato, an emergency room nurse, was 20 when she got her first tattoo, but she’s acquired most of her ink in the past five years or so. Although she has to cover them up at work, they make her happy.

“I just like the way they make me look at myself and the way they make me feel about myself,” she says. “I think they’re remarkably pretty, and I just like having them.”

She is inspired by paintings. Usually, she finds a painting she loves and brings a photo of it to her artist for him to interpret.

Some tattoo enthusiasts collect tattoos from many artists. But Naccarato chooses to stay with one artist because of his talent and intensity. He’s always as excited to do a tattoo as she is to receive it, she says.

“It’s a relationship with that person,” she says. “I want you to want to do this, and I want you to be proud of what you’ve done. I love that he’s excited to do them.”

Her Texas Theatre tattoo is in color and represents the current version of the sign. Stuard has the sign and the marquee announcing “Debbie Does Dallas.” And McCullough has an older version of the sign in black-and-white.

They’re the same but different.

McCullough says she got a couple of regrettable tattoos when she was 18, and then she started getting nice, expensive tattoos around age 35.

She has a pair of buttons on her wrists; scissors, a sewing needle and thread on her upper arm; and opposite her Texas Theatre tattoo, an outline of Michigan, her home state. She and Naccarato both have lace designs on their shoulders.

“I encourage people to wait until they’re old (to be tattooed),” McCullough says. “Most of my best decisions did not come at 18.”