Elisa Fasulo — who lives half the year just outside of Altamont — has carved out a quiet life, running her own art gallery and tattoo shop in southwestern Florida two weeks of every month, and the rest of the time teaching tattooing at Austin’s School of Spa Technology in Albany.

But it was a long, bumpy, and sometimes dangerous road to this place of relative calm. Just four years ago, Fasulo filmed the premiere of a Discovery Channel/TLC reality show called “Tattoo School.” When the network announced the premiere, hate mail and death threats poured in from around the world to Fasulo, the two tattoo schools she owned at the time, and the network itself.

“I was like the happy 4-H leader in Altamont. It never made sense that the whole world hated me,” Fasulo said.

Fasulo, now 54, documents her life as a tattoo teacher, including her run-in with notoriety, in her new, self-published memoir, “In Living Ink: A Memoir of Tattoo School, Reality TV and Bloody Ink” (CreateSpace, 2015).

Fasulo is no stranger to people wanting to kill her, she writes in the memoir, detailing the home invasion in 1964 that she and her family survived when she was just a toddler living on South Manning Boulevard in Albany. The would-be robber who entered her family’s home tied up all five of her siblings — but not Elisa, the youngest — and shot, point-blank, in their kitchen, the police officer who had arrived on the scene to help.

After killing the officer, the perpetrator slipped away. He was never caught, but the family continued to live in that same house another 20 years.

Fasulo’s father owned and operated Henzel-Powers, an electrical wholesale supplier that he had taken over from his father-in-law. Fasulo’s mother, who is now 91 and still lives in Albany, was a homemaker.

After attending the State University of New York College at Cortland and earning a degree in art history with a minor in art, Fasulo made a living for years selling her hand-painted clothing at craft shows. She had moved to Altamont in 1992 “because I love the Altamont Fair,” she said.

She explained: It isn’t just that she liked going to the fair, although that’s how it started. When she was a child, her father took her to the fair every year, and “it was always the best day of my life.”

After moving to Altamont with her first husband, Michael, and having her two daughters (who are now in their twenties and living in New York City), “We literally participated in the fair ever year, with everything. We entered turkeys, ducks, chickens, ponies, baking, arts and crafts, fine arts, and sometimes vegetables. We would joke that we ‘were the fair.’”

Later, after her first marriage broke up and she was looking for a change of career, Fasulo got her first tattoo at age 38, as a way of reclaiming her identity and reminding everyone that she was more than just a parent. She writes in the memoir, “As soon as that needle broke open the skin on my upper arm, and a beautiful shade of aqua appeared beneath the surface, I knew I was having an experience that I would never forget.”

It was like painting, she writes, but with different brushes and “on much more interesting canvas” than what she was used to.

Becoming a tattoo artist and teacher

Where other people might start thinking about what tattoo to get next, she started thinking about becoming a tattoo artist.

Becoming one was a process that happened slowly. Her then-boyfriend (now-husband) Jeff got a job at Spaulding & Rogers, a New Scotland tattoo equipment manufacturing plant. Eventually he started his own business manufacturing tattoo needles.

One year, her husband gave Fasulo a tattoo artist’s starter kit for Christmas. A friend who was stranded at their house outside Altamont during a snowstorm told her it was time to start, and that she should try tattooing him. That was her first. She then practiced on friends and family and slowly got better, creating a portfolio the whole time.

She called the town zoning board and learned that her house at 763 Altamont-Voorheesville Road, with its horses in back, was legally zoned to house a business. In 2003, after undergoing a lengthy process of licensing with the county health department, she opened a shop called Tattoos by Lisa in a studio attached to her home.

She kept doing tattoos for several years before agreeing to teach one student how to tattoo. She then decided to advertise online that she was offering tattoo classes and see what happened.

What happened was that she began to get students from around the world, who in the early years would stay at rented rooms in a home in Altamont during the two weeks of the course. She got New York State Department of Education licensing, which was, she writes, “the most trying and stressful bureaucratic process I have ever endured.”

She now owned a state licensed and regulated tattoo school.

But the operation was getting a little big for Altamont, and a little chaotic to run out of her home. As she said recently, “It got too big. People were parking all over my lawn. The kids were having to step over half-naked tattooed bodies when they got off the bus. The bus drivers were like, ‘What does your mother do again?’”

Plus, she said, she felt bad unleashing all these tattoo students on Altamont.

“The students were what I nicely call ‘alternative.’ Alternative and colorful. These people were as wacky as they come. They’d be loose in Altamont. They’d be in the Home Front Café. They had spiked hair, no hair, piercings all over. When they walked down the street, you could tell who they were. My husband went to the Home Front every morning for coffee, and he would come back with stories of what the students had been up to the day before [at nights or on the weekend] — spending time with George Pratt riding horses, conning villagers into taking them places in their cars.”

With Jeff now joining her running the shop, they moved the business in 2007 to a new building in Rotterdam where it could double in size and begin to take on six students at once. Fasulo said of her students, “I bought a house by my school in Rotterdam and housed them there, so then they were my problem. I got them out of Altamont. Then they were tame, compared to everybody else in Rotterdam. Put it this way: They fit right in.”

The school was thriving, and Fasulo had even opened a second location in San Diego, California — in order to better reach students on the West Coast — but she was getting tired of the difficulty of running a business and coping with students who sometimes had drug or personal problems, tattooed one another illegally outside of the school, or stole equipment from her. While many students were “lovely gifted people,” the frequency of the negative incidents was, she writes, “soul crushing.”

“Nightmare blur”

It was at this juncture that the Discovery Channel came calling, wanting Fasulo to star in a reality television show to be called “Tattoo School” that they would film in the Rotterdam school.

Fasulo writes in “In Living Ink” that, as she saw it, the main reason for the outpouring of vitriol toward her was anger at her for upsetting the established system within the tattoo world of apprenticeships as the only accepted way to learn the art of tattooing. This is a system that she calls “indenture.”

Her memoir describes it this way: “In the tattoo industry an apprentice is considered an indentured slave. There is no such thing as formal contracts and the apprentice is subject to the errant whims of the artist. Coffee running, bathroom swabbing, and sexual favors are the three staples of a tattoo apprenticeship. No tattoo artist will dispute me on this description. They think it’s funny.”

Her school upset this system by offering an alternative, she told The Enterprise, one in which everything is clearly spelled out and “for their tuition, they are going to learn A through Z.” In addition, she said, she thinks that they were afraid of the sheer numbers of new tattoo artists that a school would be capable of sending out into the world, “who could conceivably take business from them.”

Looking back on it now, she said, the main issue may simply have been that tattoo enthusiasts heard the show’s name, “Tattoo School,” and imagined that Fasulo would be on television actually teaching viewers how to tattoo.

This, she says, explains why the viral hate died down immediately after the show premiered. “They realized it’s just a reality show, and I wasn’t on there teaching,” she said.

The crew arrived and was on site for three weeks, filming for two.

TLC wanted her to “kick up the drama” in the shop for the sake of the show, but she did not, knowing that she needed to maintain a professional outlook, for the sake of the shop’s future.

”But the students were dramatic,” she said, “a few of them. They threw themselves under the bus.” How so? “Whiny, baby behavior and some poor choices of projects that they wanted to do that were beyond them, and they crashed and burned. For one student, though, it went great.”

The network announced the show just two weeks before the premiere, and the Discovery Channel, too, like Fasulo, began to get hate mail from around the world.

“I got mail from all over the world, including Japan and Australia, she said. “They posted my home address, they found my kids’ Facebook pages. The really clever ones found some former students and hated on them. It’s like a big nightmare blur.”  

The network was not much help to her in terms of providing security, Fasulo said. “They tried to distance themselves from us.”

The network had had an incident less than a year before, she said, in which a “mad shooter,” as she referred to him in her memoir, had entered the Discovery Channel building in Maryland, firing shots and taking hostages. That incident ended with the attacker being shot dead. No doubt, Fasulo writes, TLC was “still on edge” from that episode. Plus, they were getting their own “scary hate mail so they were focused on their own damage control and security.”

The threats to her, her family, and her school got so bad — not to mention that 50,000 people had vowed online to come to a protest at the school in Rotterdam scheduled for the day before the TV show’s premiere — that Fasulo and her husband had to call local police.

“This was 2011,” she said. “We’re all familiar with viral hate now, but then it was kind of new. Now we know that it comes in and goes out just as fast, but at the time it was really scary.” For those two weeks, her website kept crashing, her phone message filled up over and over, and she needed someone to “help me navigate the media.”

The protest in Rotterdam never materialized. And the next night, 1.2 million viewers across the country watched the premiere.

TLC went on to air the premiere eight more times over the summer. It did not, however, return to film an entire season, but instead let the show die.

Was she unhappy about that? “Absolutely not. The hours were too long. You cannot maintain a normal family life doing that. I couldn’t be Mom for those two weeks.” Fasulo had signed a contract that she would do a season if the Discovery Channel requested her to; she was ready, though, to get a lawyer to try to get out of that contract if necessary, “on the basis of the hate I experienced.”

Industry changes

She sold the New York school to Austin’s in 2014. Now she works for Austin’s, she said, and no longer “has to deal with the headaches of running a business.” She appreciates that Austin’s allows her a great deal of freedom to teach the way she wants. She opened her shop, called Lisa’s Art Camp, on Pine Island, Florida, near Fort Myers, this past June.

Everything has changed in the industry, she said, since the events around the television show. “One hundred percent. Nobody hates on us any more,” she said. “Shops that I don’t know are sending us students. Now everybody accepts that there’s formal tattoo education. I had to take one for the team for that!”

It took her two years to write the story of her tattoo school. Much of that time was spent taking advice from literary agents and whittling down the narrative to just “the main story.” She repackaged it “100 times,” she said.

What’s really nice about having written it, she said, is, “I find now that I have so let it go.” She had a whole drawer full of items from that period: hate mail she had printed out, logs of angry calls she received, and copies of slanted articles that ran in various papers. She recently threw it all away.