The Eye And The Needle Pair Of Swans Bring Love Of Beauty And Art To Palouse Tattoo Parlor

It is an unlikely permutation of family values. But here are Beth and Telisa Swan, mother and daughter, bonding. Love of art joins them, that and a business with a raffish reputation.

Little City Studios, near the city park on Main Street, offers “Custom Tattoo and Exotic Body Piercing,” according to Telisa Swan’s business card.

“Tattoo As Fine Art,” her card proclaims. It is no idle boast. The Swans are fine arts graduates of Washington State University.

The studio is an understated presence among the storefronts here. But the idea of a tattoo parlor sits as garishly as, well, a tattoo, on this small town.

Telisa Swan opened on Halloween in 1994, but not before going some rounds with the City Council and hearing tattooing described as immoral, she says. She also had to explain to her landlord that she wasn’t operating an elaborate drug front.

She was voluntarily inoculated against hepatitis, studied blood-borne diseases and wrote her operating procedures for the council.

The opportunity to create art brought them here. The daughter blazed the trail.

Her mother’s original response: “You’ve got a $30,000 education and you’re going to do what? “Then I noticed she was working a lot more regularly than I was.”

Beth Swan, a counselor in San Diego, was trying to develop her own career as a greeting card and portrait artist. “I’d hang out here and watch and think ‘Wow, she gets to do art every day.”’

She closed her counseling business and moved to Palouse recently to work for her daughter.

“It’s nice to have art to share,” she says. “She says it’s all my fault she’s an artist, I made her one. She has a wilder imagination than I do.”

And rigorous standards.

“She hasn’t got an A yet,” Telisa Swan says of her mother. “Well, she makes me grade her. She makes me give her a letter grade.”

“She gave me a C once,” her mother says. “I’ll never forget it.”

Beth Swan was introduced to tattooing at an early age. She remembers, at age 3, being fascinated when her father came home with the U.S. Navy insignia tattooed on his forearm.

“My Mom went through the ceiling. I remember my Dad saying, ‘Well, Beth likes it.”’

She had her own chance to go ballistic when her sons were young.

“I came home one day and my sons were tattooing each other with a sewing needle dipped in ink. They don’t have an artistic bone between them.”

One son’s recent marriage was cause for a family reunion. Beth Swan took the opportunity to cover up her boys’ homemade work with her own tattoos - and maybe exacted a mother’s revenge with a tattoo needle.

She gleefully describes the scene. “This is for the window you broke. This is for the carpet you ruined.”

“We have a photo,” Telisa Swan says. “It was a Kodak moment.”

A tattoo gun makes a sound somewhat like the dreadful whine of a dentist’s drill, but it’s more of a cheerful chatter - the rhythm of Little City Studios.

While the mother-and-daughter team no longer feels unwelcome in Palouse, most of the clientele comes from Pullman.

“You never see dull people in here,” says Beth Swan. A big corner of the lobby is taken up by Slider’s cage. He’s a red-tailed boa constrictor the size of a fire hose. Nearby is a hand-lettered sign on an empty glass cage: “Be advised, my Geckos have escaped. If you see them don’t hurt them or be afraid. Thanks.

“P.S. Don’t pick them up either - they bite. I’ll do it.”

The door opens, and in walk Warren and Connie Devaney, shucking clothing. He’s eager to show the dragon crawling up his arm, the flowing-haired Circe across his back. His wife displays the smiling Buddha on her shoulder, the fish on her ankle, the rose on her thigh, all the Swans’ work.

Warren Devaney remembers a liberally tattooed friend. “He had his skin willed to a woman.”

“We get a lot of women, older women, women in transition,” says Telisa Swan.

“One woman came in for a tattoo to celebrate her loss of 200 pounds,” her mother adds.

Other notables: Michael Joubert, the former WSU runner, who competed for Australia in the Olympics last summer. He came for a nose piercing, nipple piercing and to have “Fear Nothing” tattooed across his shoulders.

A difficult drawing instructor, who gave neither mother nor daughter an A when they were students, came from WSU to be tattooed. Says Telisa Swan: “That was my A.”

A friend taught her the basics, she’s learned much about tattooing on her own, and she’s teaching her mother. A tattoo gun stroke is up and away, she says, unlike a drawing pencil, which is pulled down and toward you. The trick in working with skin is learning its texture.

“It’s either like butter or leather or somewhere in between, and places that don’t see the sun don’t take color well.”

The quiet force behind Little City Studios is Telisa Swan’s husband, Allen Coahran.

“After I did my first tattoo, he bought me a (tattoo) gun and said ‘This is going to be your new career.’ It sat on the desk for four months,” she says. “I was scared. These things don’t come with an eraser.”

But she took up the gun and great things happened. She loves the work. Now another family value, the bond between husband and wife, will be honored.

A customer, Jan D’Amico of Moscow, observed, “You can’t hang around this place without eventually wanting a tattoo.” Beth Swan has a tiny one on her ankle. Her daughter has one on the nape of her neck. Coahran is an untouched canvas, so far.

But he’s got plans, says Telisa Swan, on a Grateful Dead theme. “‘The Cumberland Mine,’ ‘The Beggar’s Tomb.’ When we do him, it’s gonna be cool.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos