Tattoo artist Kat Von D found fame and fortune starring on the reality TV show Miami Ink,
before leaving for her own west coast iteration, LA Ink.
But there's more to the famously feisty star than just her ink and her eccentric vegan
vibes.
Here's the untold truth of Kat Von D.
One way to completely destroy your reputation is to be a rumored anti-Semite.
Yet, for some reason, despite concerning evidence, Kat Von D hasn't been splashed across the
headlines as someone who might think of Jews as unequal to others.
But Jewish pop culture outlet, Forward, compiled a bunch of worrying indications.
Some of it is guilt by association.
Kat seems oddly cool being with guys who are into controversial stuff.
At one point she was engaged to Jesse James, who was pictured in a partial Nazi uniform,
while performing a Nazi salute.
Her current husband, Leafar Sayer, admitted to a tattoo zine to having a swastika tattooed
on his throat, but said it quote, "isn't political."
She was also once accused of signing an autograph to her former Jewish boss with a slur.
She claimed the writing was forged by a disgruntled former coworker.
"Just to set the record straight from the beginning, I wanna say I am not anti-Semetic."
Kat, who is herself Latina, finally addressed the rumors in March 2019, saying in an emotional
video on her channel,
"I can't just keep letting other people write this narrative that's so inaccurate.
It's so false and so awful."
But that wasn't the only negative press plaguing her reputation.
Kat famously lives an eccentric, vegan, hippie kind of lifestyle.
And when she got pregnant with her first child, she posted on Instagram about the kind of
life she was going to give her son.
She announced she planned to stay vegan, and that she wanted to have a natural, drug-free
home birth.
And she claimed that once the child was born she wasn't going to feed him any animal products,
either.
But then she said she wasn't going to vaccinate her son.
People went crazy.
Because suddenly it wasn't just her choice and one for her child, but something that
could affect the world at large.
Herd immunity is important, according to the CDC, and children who are unable to be vaccinated
can put everyone at risk.
"Now I wanna talk about the uproar that I accidentally caused back when I talked about
vaccines when I was pregnant."
Months after her son arrived, Kat went on to also address the anti-vax rumor, via her
YouTube channel, in March 2019, posting:
"I am not an anti-vaxxer.
What I am is a first time mother."
She claimed that at the time of her Instagram post, she had been researching options, but
that her son is now under the supervision of a pediatrician.
She added,
"I am choosing not to make our decision, or any of our baby's health records public, and
I just wanna thank you guys for respecting that."
Most tattoo artists would probably tell you that getting ink for your significant other
is a sign of the end, but Kat seems to have a tattoo for everyone she's ever dated.
"I mean I have like, you know, my exes names and stuff and like I don't look at them and
get sad, I just seem them as landmarks in time for me."
In fact, according to Inked Magazine, the first of her dozens of tattoos she has now,
was for her first love.
She was only a teenager and got an Old English style "J" for James on her ankle.
But the tattoo lasted longer than the relationship.
"We lasted for a good three years, and now it stands for just kidding."
She also has "Orbi" for Alex Orbison, musician Ray Orbison's son.
But her biggest piece was for her ex-husband, Oliver Peck.
Describing him as quote, "one of the coolest-looking guys [she'd] ever met," he earned a spot on
her thigh.
However, she eventually got the Peck ink removed.
And, according to UsWeekly in 2012, her Jesse James' portrait also got the boot.
"Although some tattoos have a lot of meaning, ultimately I just like the way they look."
For Kat, being a famous tattoo artist wasn't enough: She wanted to be in the record books.
And she got her wish, for a little while, anyway.
She pulled it off when she was 25, according to the World Record Academy.
The rules were simple; to get in the Guinness Book of World Records she had to tattoo the
exact same design on as many people as possible in a 24-hour period.
She charged $20 per tattoo, and it all went to charity.
"Twenty dollars saved 80 kids from going blind, so we ended up saving 32,000 kids from going
blind."
In the end Kat managed to ink 400 people, taking just nine minutes off the entire day.
But don't go looking for her in the book anymore.
Inked Magazine says her ex-husband Oliver Peck, also a tattoo artist, specifically set
out to beat her record and did it.
Allegedly, she isn't angry about it.
There are a lot of reasons not to drink before getting tattooed.
For one, the ink won't hold as well and your tattoo will fade faster.
But Kat ignored this basic advice for years because for a long time she had a severe drinking
problem.
She admitted to Inked that she used to drink before getting all her tattoos, including
once when she drank an entire bottle of tequila before inking "Mi Vida Loca" on her back.
While she has a hard time getting tattooed sober, she says it's better for the artist
when someone isn't full on puking on themselves.
According to People magazine, by 25 her drinking was getting in the way of her job.
She says she promised herself that if alcohol ever hindered her ability to work, she would
quit.
So one day she woke up and decided to stop drinking.
Kat admits she lost a lot of friends who were really only drinking buddies.
But it was worth it, though; in 2017 she celebrated 10 years of sobriety.
Kat isn't just a famous tattoo artist and reality star, she also has an extremely successful
makeup line.
And it seems like a lot of people buy it in spite of the controversy surrounding it.
"I had the idea of doing a photoshoot with Billy Joe where we kind of like pay homage
to this old poster that I used to have as a kid."
According to Allure, in 2017 she introduced an eyeliner called Basket Case, after the
Green Day song of the same name.
While people took offense to the name, they were even more upset with her promo image,
which seemed to celebrate the famously violent and eventually deadly relationship between
Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.
Kat hit back on Instagram, claiming that lots of great people had messed up lives, and they
should still be honored.
In 2013, Sephora, which exclusively sells the brand, gave in and finally pulled a product
because of its name.
The Globe and Mail reported that public backlash was also so great over a lipstick called "Celebutard"
that they had to take it out of their stores.
There is a code when it comes to tattoos.
No matter how cool someone else's idea is, you can't just take it.
Tattoos are way too personal to randomly be stealing them from other people.
But Kat, despite being one of the most famous tattoo artists in the world, totally broke
the rules.
She's come up with thousands of ideas in her time and has dozens of her own creations on
her skin, but her most famous tattoo didn't come from her creative brain.
Kat likes showing off her stomach, where she has the word "Hollywood" inked in what looks
like red lipstick.
It's even become her trademark.
But she owes that fame to a random quote, "cool rocker chick" who came into her shop
once, according to an interview with Inked Magazine.
The inspiration comes from a band called the New York Dolls whose logo was their name in
lipstick.
This customer, who must have had a connection to LA like Kat, wanted the same thing but
for her neck of the woods.
Instead of giving it to her, though, Kat took it for herself.
Of course karma came after her for it, so instead of never seeing the rocker girl again
like she probably hoped, Kat ran into her at a bar, with her own midriff showing.
The woman must have seen the tattoo but kindly didn't say anything.
Kat says she would be more than happy to ink it on her as well, so they could be quote,
"twinsies."
Kat wrote about her early years, via Popsugar, and she wants you to know that while her dad
was a doctor, she didn't grow up in your typical medical profession family.
Most people assume kids with a doctor as a parent probably come from money and live a
life of some luxury.
But it seems this could not be further from the truth for Kat Von D.
"My dad is my hero, and I always, you know, attribute any good quality of me to him."
Originally from Argentina, Kat's parents got married and moved to Mexico, where she and
her two siblings were born.
The tiny town of Montemorelos didn't have a hospital so her dad started one.
But while it was a boon to the community, the flipside was that his family was dirt
poor, literally.
Kat remembers running around barefoot on the packed dirt floors of their little house.
It didn't have electricity or even running water for an extensive period of time, and
the result was that they bathed in buckets.
The town itself had more horses on the streets than cars.
She was only 4 when they left Mexico and road-tripped to Loma Linda, California, but her lifestyle
still didn't change much.
While even a tiny town like that outside Los Angeles probably had access to basic household
amenities like fresh water and lights on demand, her family's religion meant they still lived
a very stoic existence.
"You know, I had a mohawk, and they were just like, 'Oh my God, the Devil's taking over!'
You know?"
When Inked Magazine interviewed Kat at her house, it was full of statues of the Virgin
Mary and images of Jesus on the cross.
But her decor actually evolved in spite of her strictly religious upbringing and not
because of it.
Her family were devout Seventh-day Adventists, a mix of Christianity with some Jewish traits.
This meant, among other things, that having that kind of imagery around was a no-no, and
considered idolatry.
Kat remembers her sister wanting to wear a rosary and being told it wasn't appropriate.
Her family's religion influenced everything about her life.
Her father chose to be a doctor in the middle of nowhere because he was also a missionary.
Even when they moved to America they picked a town with a large Seventh-day Adventist
community, according to Popsugar.
Kat says that as a child she didn't work on Sundays, went to church, followed the Ten
Commandments, and even had strict dietary requirements, like not eating pork or fish
without scales.
Kat says her life revolved around religion instead of pop culture.
She didn't hear any music other than classical or hymns until she was 6.
They didn't have a TV, and she only watched MTV for the first time when she was 16 and
at a friend's house.
Her idea of a famous person was Jesus, but as Kat puts it, she was never going to get
to meet him, so the concept of fame was foreign to her.
Living in the sticks, not having access to even the most basic technology, meant Kat
spent a lot of her childhood entertaining herself.
She drew constantly, and her talent was evident from a young age.
But she still had a lot of time on her hands, so she took up the piano at age 5, as she
told the Glenn Gould Foundation.
In her case, she had help, since her grandmother was a classically trained pianist.
She taught Kat everything she knew and passed on an absolute obsession with Beethoven in
particular.
Kat says she finally fell in love with the piano after learning to play his "Sonata in
G."
"There's never been anything else that I've been more madly in love with than music."
But before that came a tough learning curve.
Since everyone in Kat's family played at least two instruments, she was expected to learn
one.
So she spent two hours a day, every day, hitting those keys, while watching what she called
"normal" kids play outside where she longed to be.
In the end, she says it was absolutely worth it, and she still plays to this day.
She even performed at her own wedding reception.
It's something she also encourages other people to take up.
For most of her life she didn't have a nice piano, but she notes that you can pick them
up for a couple hundred bucks on Craigslist, hire someone to tune it, then off you go.
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