LUCY THOMPSON

I started my career as a traditional tattoo artist, specialising in scar tissue work.

I received a request for a nipple tattoo and spoke to my aunt, who'd bravely undergone a mastectomy due to breast cancer. I was heartbroken to learn about her poorly done hospital tattoo and the negative impact it had on her.

Determined to offer a better solution, I found an artist in the USA offering training for 3D realistic nipple tattoos and scraped my savings together and travelled over on my own to learn this advanced skill.
I became the UKs first A.R.T 3D Nipple Tattoo certified tattoo artist

Unknowingly at the time, this made me the first person in the U.K. to offer a 3D realistic and permanent option.

This was verified in a BBC feature, after which I was inundated by people who were living with partially faded hospital nipple tattoos. After my first 50 nipple tattoos I was struggling to manage the workload and the free tattoos were taking over from my normal work. As a single parent running my own tattoo studio I needed something to help with the costs of this service.

I thought it would be great to have a charity that could offer a directory of specially trained artists to make this high quality service possible and also a pot of money to cover the costs for the artists, so we could still continue to offer these tattoos for free and make them more accessible to those who needed them.

So I started the UK's first mastectomy tattoo charity - The Nipple Innovation Project. I knew I didn’t want anyone else to feel as low as my auntie did and by having a trusted organisation, one day, the goal was to take over from the NHS.

I attended the titanic tattoo convention in 2019 and tattooed nipples on a wonderful lady who suggested at the last minute we should enter them into a competition as she felt so empowered by her new artwork! We entered the realism contest and won amongst a bunch of extremely talented international tattoo artists. The bravery of this woman showing the judges her nipple tattoos caught the hearts of everyone in the room, there wasn't a dry eye, it was a beautiful moment and the first time something like this had ever been done.

The Nipple Innovation Project received official recognition by the Charity Commission.

Because there were no other charities like this that existed, there were no guidelines to follow or take inspiration from, it took two years of hard work, blood, sweat, tears and commitment by our committee to get registered by the charity commission in 2020 which was a huge milestone for us. a very proud achievement.

We attended the oncology convention and were asked to give a lecture on the work we do, we were asked to speak twice during the time we were there and we found our talks gained lots and lots of attention, more than others we had seen. We had lots of people come and ask us more questions as we shared data gathered by a survey we completed to shine a light on the psychological impact of this work. Our work was well received and respected amongst medical professionals.

I received the "Agent of Change" award at the Simply Ladies Awards for my work with The Nipple Innovation Project and advocacy in the breast cancer community.

After learning how the NHS have specific guidelines in place to outsource this work, I looked into having my own areola pigment set that was of a pharmaceutical grade standard to ensure I was offering a truly safe service to my clients. I used these pigments for 2 years before launching it in 2022. I'm so proud to have my own areola pigment set with leading brand Goldeneye Coloressence, proud to recommend it to other artists who do this work knowing it is created using safe raw materials with people with compromised immune systems.

After completing thousands of nipple tattoo treatments and gaining extensive knowledge and experience with this work I finally felt it was time to share my knowledge with others and set up the Areola Academy to teach other artists how to safely do this work, from the perspective of a lifelong artist and traditional tattoo artist.

My training was approved by a NHS trust where I taught a medical practitioner advanced skills to uplevel her basic areola training knowledge. We spent a wonderful two days together, historically the NHS have only used two training providers before for their areola training so to be recognised as a training provider by them is a huge huge step and one I believe that will open many doors for a higher standard of education which should help reduce the amount of overworked and fading tattoos currently done in hospitals.

I am approached by NHS Trusts to become a provider.
This is the ultimate dream come true for me, at the meeting i explained how this was bigger than me and a common issue throughout the whole of the UK and asked that they consider making that connection with the charity rather than myself as a business owner, so we can mirror the process and connect with other NHS trusts where we have other skilled artists in the UK and also offer this high quality service within their community.