Artist profile — Sofia Estrella

By Ant Perrucci

Sitting on a brown sofa, Sofia Estrella took off her scarf to better show off the tattoo on her neck.

“It’s clean and beautiful,” she said. “It’s an amazing representation – even on my old, goozely neck – an amazing representation of what tattooing can be. It’s an amazing piece.”

I take a closer look. The design inscribed onto Estrella’s throat looks like it just belongs there. Like it was placed there, untouched by human hands. Clean, bright, even lines. No jagged edges, no blow-outs, no diffusions. That’s some damn good work.

“I wanted every line on it to be a piece of art, and it is,” Estrella said. “I’ve been on it with a high-powered microscope, there is not one blown line in it, and trust me, on a neck it is very difficult to pull that off. I’m not sure if I could do it.”

Inside the bright purple building on the corner of Lemon and US-1 that locals can readily identify as Miss Deborah’s Fountain of Youth, Sofia Estrella – a.k.a. Miss Deborah – is clad in black. Every visible patch of skin has something on it, from the design on her neck to a red heart (that reads “MOM”) on her leg.

The shop itself – purple outside, red interior, walls covered in artwork – is itself reflective of the woman who runs it. When it opened in 1994, Deborah, as she was then known, already had a wealth of experience. Her first husband, Eric Inksmith, is a well-known tattoo artist. In the 1980s, the couple opened Inksmith and Rogers Tattoo in Jacksonville; today, there are a half dozen of the shops. Just as Fountain of Youth was the St. Augustine area’s first, so was Inksmith and Rogers the first of its kind in Jacksonville.

“I came from [a] generation of secretaries and waitresses and airline stewardesses and people like that. Those were jobs for women,” Estrella said. “I was the only artist, anything, in the family. So I took a risk, black sheep, the whole nine yards and ventured off and I decided that if I did not learn to tattoo then my ex-husband was gonna have a whole lot more fun than I was gonna have in any job that I could ever possibly have. And I was intrigued by tattooing so I cut the umbilical cord to the universe and branched out on my own.”

It was on a trip to Mexico that Estrella had what she describes as a spiritual awakening that led to her new name. “We were on a journey and we were riding in a van with a bunch of us one day, and the comment was made to me, ‘You know, in this life, on this trip, we can be anybody we want to be. We can change our name, your name is only a name, it’s not who you are.’” She said. “It’s like, oh my God! That’s so true, my mom gave me that name, I didn’t pick it out.”

She took the name Sofia, and a comet sighting on the same trip to Mexico provided the inspiration for ‘Estrella,’ which means ’star’ in Spanish.

“So that I adopted as my new name and I am in the process of getting it legally changed as we speak,” she said.

For the size of the town it is, St. Augustine has a lot of tattoo shops. “I can say I’m a little bit responsible for that,” she said.

Though in the past she held grudges against what she termed ’spite shops’ that opened blocks away, Estrella now says she has no time for anger.

“I don’t choose to be at arms anymore with anything in my life. I put my weapons down a long time ago,” Estrella said. “I stopped fighting and starting loving.”