In this episode, I sit down with tattoo artist Alexandra Husmann and Joy Practitioner Thea Monyee to reflect on a deeply collaborative, intuitive tattooing journey we’ve been creating together over time. What began as a subtle, gentle first layer evolved into a living, breathing practice of trust, improvisation, and shared authorship where skin became a canvas for “jazz,” duality and embodied truth.

We talk about what it means to let tattooing be a conversation rather than a plan, how collaboration can dissolve boundaries between artists and clients, and why the most meaningful creations often require us to slow down, pause, and live with the work before adding more. This episode opens up the inner world behind intuitive tattooing where consent, vulnerability, and listening to the body become the real art.

Thea weaves in her work around joy and grief as coexisting forces, reminding us that joy is not surface-level happiness but a metric of aliveness and that anticipatory grief is often what keeps us from fully expressing who we are. Together, we explore tattoos as portals for visibility, healing, and becoming, and why choosing to create (and live) out loud can feel both terrifying and liberating.

In this episode we talk about:

✨ Collaborative tattooing as jazz, call and-response and improvisation

✨ What intuitive tattooing really means beyond aesthetics

✨ Why blank spaces on skin and in life are essential for creation

✨ Navigating duality: softness and structure, flow and geometry, joy and grief

✨ Consent as a nourishing, pleasure-centered practice

✨ Tattoos as embodied markers of transformation and becoming visible

Plus, Thea shares more about her joy-centered work, including her free joy assessment and upcoming joy immersion experiences and Alex talks about her approach to collaborative, intuitive tattooing and finding harmony within existing forms.

This conversation is an invitation to trust the process, to honor not knowing, and to allow creativity to be a living relationship rather than a fixed outcome. Like jazz, like life, like a tattoo that keeps unfolding.

Connect with Thea Monyeé

Instagram: @theamonyee

Connect with Alex:

Website: www.alexandrahusmann.com

Instagram: @alexhtattoos

Connect with Me:

Instagram:@justineartstudio

Website: www.justinealmaraz.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JustineArtStudio