"I used to joke that I wanted my tattoo shop to be like ... 'I don't know, am I going to a witch's house? Am I going to a spa?'" Rebecca said. "I don't want that in-your-face tattoo shop [with] bright lights and everything is everywhere. For this space, I'm really going for a cross between a spa ... a sanctuary ... a church of tattooing."
Rebecca has been in the tattoo industry for nearly two decades, which began with an apprenticeship at Classic Tattoo in San Marcos.
"The short version of what happened was I just made myself very useful at Classic and that's how I got my apprenticeship ... I just did all the stuff that nobody else wanted to do," Rebecca said. "I started tattooing November of 2006, and I just stayed pretty loyal and stayed to the grind at Classic."
Over the years and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, Rebecca said that she wanted to shift her focus to appointment-only work instead of the walk-ins and dreamed of her own space to do so.
The change of the downtown San Marcos landscape since the early 2000s was also a point of contention for Rebecca.
"When I first started at Classic Tattoo, it was still sleepy San Marcos," she said. "I watched downtown go from an incredibly safe place where you could walk around at 2 o'clock in the morning and not encounter much craziness to it being borderline Sixth Street [in downtown Austin]."
Rebecca specializes in mostly black-work tattoos in an ornamental, decorative style that includes florals and pattern work. She also likes tattoos to focus more so on longevity.
"I try pretty hard to talk to with my clients that tattoos are fashion and that if we're going to wear a shirt for the rest of our lives, it shouldn't have too much obvious meaning," Rebecca said. "I work [with] the idea of 'What is the piece of lingerie that you want to wear forever?' Like, 'Is this going to make you happy when you're naked, looking in the mirror?'"
Rise and Shine Tattoos is an appointment-only studio; the form to submit an appointment request is available on Rebecca and Brandon's Instagram pages.
Instagram: RiseandShineTattoos, BeccaDoodleTattoos, Doon_Tattoos
