Laura Cui uncapped a lavender Sharpie and started drawing on Becca May’s forearm. Less than a minute later, she was done.

“Go ahead and check that out,” Cui said.

“I already love it,” May said as she hopped down from her seat.

She stepped in front of the mirror. On her arm was a simple but striking drawing of an oyster. Next, purple marker will be replaced by more permanent ink.

Cui, 36, is an artist and co-owner of Fortune Teller Tattoo in Portland. This linework bivalve tattoo has become one of her signatures. She estimates that she has done more than 100, so many that she started the hashtag #cluboyster on Instagram to collect photos of them. Still, each one is unique because she does them freehand, just as she did for May.

“It’s recognizable,” Cui said. “People see them and know they’re mine. But they’re also all different.”

***

Rachel Hatem got her first tattoo when she was 18 – a tiny peace sign, tucked behind her ear. Growing up in Scarborough, she thought tattoos were an interesting form of self-expression. Now 29, she has collected more than a dozen. She works as a kindergarten special education teacher, and her students like the flowers that grow on her arm.

“They are little pieces of art,” she said.

Some of her tattoos have a sentimental origin. Her father survived a heart attack when she was a child, and her family has been involved with the American Heart Association ever since, so she got an anatomical drawing of a heart tattooed on the back of her arm. But many are drawn from the natural world – shells, a shark, a butterfly.

“I think they look beautiful, and that’s why I wanted them,” she said.

Hatem first connected with Cui after she won a free tattoo from the artist in an Instagram giveaway in 2021. Social media is a big part of how she and many other clients decide which tattoo artists they like. She got a ginkgo leaf, another one of Cui’s signatures. She has since returned to Cui for other tattoos, including the oyster.

“Growing up, my grandparents lived in Ogunquit,” she said. “We were at the beach all the time. It’s my happy place. It’s where I go when I’m sad or mad. I like that I get to collect another part of the ocean.”

Hatem now lives in Durham. Sometimes, while at her summer brewery job or out with friends in the city, she spies her own tattoo on other people.

“I run into people in Portland that have oysters, and ours will be completely different,” she said.

***

Cui grew up in Massachusetts and Maine. As a kid, she was always sketching. She liked the tattoos and mohawks and colorful hair she saw on other shoppers at the cooperative grocery store she and her mom frequented. Her family moved to Brunswick the summer before she started high school. She left for college at the University of Vermont, where she double majored in art and anthropology.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to be a tattoo artist?’ But it always felt like an unattainable thing. Most people don’t know a lot of tattoo artists in person, right? I didn’t have any tattoo artist friends,” she said.

She got her first tattoo when she was 18. She’s since covered it with another design, but it was an outline of the Earth, inspired by a foray into environmental studies.

“I thought about it for a long time,” she said. “I had heard from other people you should have your first tattoo idea for a year, and if you still like it, then you can get it. Which I think is good advice for a young person. If you’re 30, maybe you don’t have to have the idea for that long. People can do whatever they want, but it’s not a bad way to go.”

She graduated in 2009 but stayed in Vermont for another 10 years. She had jobs at her alma mater and in restaurants, at a rock climbing gym and at a co-op. She developed friendships with the artists who were doing her tattoos, including Ivan Hess. He opened the original Fortune Teller Tattoo in Burlington, and Cui would hang out around the shop. She described herself as “a friend-slash-loiterer.” She asked Hess to take her on as an apprentice. He said no. She kept asking until he said yes.

“One of the things I like most about tattooing is the socializing aspect,” Cui said. “I’m meeting people all the time. Sometimes the interaction is brief, like five minutes. Sometimes it’s like 20 hours, not in a row, but if someone gets a full sleeve, we’ll see each other a lot. We get to know people.”

***

Andrew Moser didn’t get his first tattoo until he was in his 30s. He was working at Duckfat in Portland, and he joined a group of co-workers in getting a tattoo that tips a hat to the famously long wait on the restaurant’s busiest days.

“Once you get the first one, the gravity of the situation falls away,” he said. “You realize that, like, I’m not going to stare at this every time I look in the mirror. This is not going to drive me crazy.”

Moser, 39, grew up in Tennessee and moved to Maine more than a dozen years ago. He has made his career in restaurants and is currently a server at Twelve in Portland. Since that first tattoo, he has started getting ones that tell stories important to him. On his side, he has an illustration of Cannonball, a Marvel Comics superhero from Kentucky who says “y’all” and reminds Moser of his roots. He has a tattoo on his arm of the Endurance, the three-masted ship that sunk in 1915 when Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew tried to sail across the Antarctic.

“It helps me in my profession,” he said. “I’m like white shirt, rolled up, and I spiel a lot.” Customers often ask about the tattoos visible on his forearms. “Having other things to talk about, giving a little flair to the experience, helps me professionally as well as I like the way it looks.”

Cui has done four of his 11 or so tattoos. He was in her chair for another design when she finished her work with 30 minutes to spare before his shift started. He said he would come back to get a freehand oyster. He eats them and serves them often. (“I love them, and they pay my rent,” he said.) Cui said she could do it before he needed to get to work.

“You’re trusting the artist to do the artist’s work,” he said. “The planning on your end is fun, but it’s a little bit freeing to be the canvas.”

***

Cui got her license in 2015 and then started working at Fortune Teller Tattoo in Vermont. In 2019, she and her partner decided to move back to Maine. Hess and his wife decided to go with them. Cui, Hess and another artist, Alex Passapera, opened Fortune Teller Tattoo in Portland that fall.

She first drew the oyster for the new shop. She created a menu of sorts to give clients ideas and introduce them to her style. It captures the sharpness of her lines, the beauty of her drawings, her connection to Maine. (She had done oyster tattoos before, but this design was new. Her first one was more realistic, not a contour drawing. The client was a chef who was celebrating having shucked 20,000 oysters. It was his first tattoo.)

Months passed before someone asked for a linework oyster, but when Cui posted the first one on her Instagram in 2020, the design took off. The tattoo has a couple of factors that make it extremely appealing – it takes just minutes, and it also costs just half of Cui’s typical $200 minimum – but she was still surprised by their popularity. She did a couple “oyster days” dedicated entirely to the linework tattoos; she could do 10 in a day.

Some people get them as a souvenir on a trip to Maine. Some don’t even like oysters – they just like the tattoo. Others are oyster farmers, which Cui said always feels special. She still does mostly linework oysters, but she also does a more lifelike rendering. She likes that different people seek out the tattoo for different reasons.

She recently reopened her books for custom work. She does a lot of black-and-white illustrative designs, and she hopes to do more color and American traditional tattoos. But the oyster will remain part of her repertoire.

“There are so many reasons to get a tattoo, right?” she said. “You can get a tattoo because it’s super meaningful, and you want to represent something. But you can also get a tattoo because it looks cool. I think more and more people are doing that, which is awesome.”

***

Erin Calligan Mooney started getting tattoos in her 20s – the word “Dirigo” on her ankle, a puzzle piece on her arm – but they were always small and easily hidden. As she got older, she started to meet more people who expressed their personalities through tattoos just as you could with jewelry or clothes or a haircut.

“When I turned 40, I was like, ‘Why am I afraid to do this?'” she said. “Because it’s permanent? I’m 40. Who cares?”

She started planning a sleeve for her right arm and researching local artists. Mooney grew up in Manchester and lived in Indiana and New York before she moved back to Maine in 2020. She lives in East Bayside with her husband and their dog, and she liked Cui’s style and her location within walking distance. Many of the tattoos Cui has now done for Mooney – fall foliage, a floral corsage of berries and milkweed – are more naturalistic and lifelike. But she still wanted to be “in that club,” she said, so she got the oyster, too.

“It felt like a really cool opportunity to represent an artist’s brand but also have it be unique to me, special and my own design,” Mooney, now 41, added.

Tattoos are often a conversation starter, she said, and the most common question is that of meaning. She used to ask people, too: What is the significance of your tattoo? Then someone answered her: “It’s just a bee.”

“It made me think,” she said. “People don’t ask if you’re wearing a pair of earrings, ‘What do they mean?’ Not all tattoos have to mean something. Sometimes they can just be pretty, or they can just be badass, or they can just be something that fit within a certain spot on someone’s arm to fill up their sleeve. So now I don’t ask people what their tattoos mean. But the oyster does mean something to me.”

She loves oysters, especially the really briny ones. She has eaten them in many places – at a fancy seafood restaurant in Indianapolis, the only one she trusted to serve good oysters in the Midwest; on date nights in New York City with her husband; at J’s Oyster in Portland, where you get a baker’s dozen instead of just 12.

“I feel like any time you eat oysters, it’s a happy memory,” she said.

***

Cui sees her work as both an art and a service. As the culture around tattoos has grown, she has more clients who get tattooed as regularly as other people might get a manicure. Social media has contributed to that shift, she said, in the same way that it has been a big part of #cluboyster.

“It’s not just about getting the art,” she said. “It’s not just about getting the tattoo and leaving with this tattoo on your body. It’s also about the experience with your person because you’re spending a couple hours with them. You wouldn’t get your hair cut by someone that you didn’t get along with. It goes the same with a tattoo, I think.”

May and Cui met at a Halloween party through Hess and soon began training their dogs together and going to the same spin classes. (May has a Rottweiler named Linus. Cui has an American pitbull terrier named Mambo and a pit mix named Woody.) May, 36, works as a barber and will soon finish a degree in social work. She got her first tattoo at age 18; it says “Believe” on her back. Eighteen years later, she and Cui joke that she is going to edit it to say “Believe In Aliens.” Now, she likes to get tattoos as souvenirs when she travels.

Still, she didn’t have any by Cui. She likes to eat oysters as an appetizer when she and her spouse make sushi at home. But the design itself was less important than collecting art by her friend.

“What an honor to be able to wear someone’s creation on you indefinitely,” May said. “You can hang a painting or you can hang a drawing. But to be able to physically bring somebody’s piece with you everywhere you go for the rest of your life, it feels like a really special connection to that person and to their art.”

On a Thursday morning in February, May settled onto the table at Fortune Teller Tattoo. Cui redrew the design with a special tattoo pen and then prepared her needle.

“You know the drill,” Cui said when she started. “Stay still. Make sure you’re breathing the whole time.”

Cui flicked on her headlamp. She focused intently on the skin in front of her, dipping her needle in ink every so often and returning to the design. May hummed along to the songs playing in the shop. They chatted about mutual acquaintances and May’s other tattoos. It was over in seven minutes and 39 seconds.

“You are good to sit up and check that out in the mirror,” Cui said.

May turned her arm this way and that to admire it. The oyster, so indicative of Maine, was nestled between a tree she got in the Netherlands and a figure drawing from Portugal.

It fit perfectly in her collection.

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