ALTAMONT — It took two motorbikes, a car, and a jukebox for Jos DeJong and Anita Schellekens to get here.

And, here they sit, perched on stools like a pair of turtledoves with matching feathers, in Lisa Fasulo’s little white cottage, warmed by a potbelly stove.

“It’s a very secret society, this,” said Schellekens, gesturing at the tattoo equipment.  “It’s very father to son.”  With their lilting Dutch accents, she and DeJong list the things that they sold so that she could come to Altamont to learn to be a tattoo artist.

Twenty-five years ago, when she met DeJong, he wanted to get a tattoo.  “He got that big of a rose,” she said, holding up her hand with her thumb and forefinger an inch apart.  “I hated it.”

Back then, she was different, she said.  “I was like a lady and walking on high heels,” she said smiling, eyes cast upward, mimicking the pinched walk of a woman wearing pumps.

“Prim and proper, we say,” Fasulo added.

Schellekens comes from an artistic family, she said.  Her brother was painting DeJong’s motorcycle with a scene from a Meatloaf album cover when the two met.

Driving 120 miles per hour, three feet from the next car’s bumper was DeJong’s job at the time; he was the chauffeur for Holland’s Queen Beatrice.  It was a stressful job, he said, and he had to stop when he developed sleep apnea.  Now he drives a truck for the Dutch army.

For 17 years, Schellekens also worked for the army; she was a phone operator.  “Then I was 49 and I decided I wanted a tattoo,” she said.  “And then I was sold.”

It was the same for Fasulo.  When she got her first tattoo, at the age of 36, she decided to make a living out of it.  With a couple of kids, four horses, and a clothing-design business, she got the tattoo when her life changed.

“I got a divorce,” she said.  “I just wanted to do something wild and crazy.” 

As she watched the tattoo artist draw a flowered band around her upper arm, a pattern that she designed, Fasulo was inspired.  “I’ve been painting longer than they’ve been living,” she said of the crowd working in the tattoo parlor.  “So I thought, I can do this.”

Fasulo opened up shop in her house just outside of Altamont in 2001 and started a tattoo school three years ago.  Tattoos By Lisa Tattoo School was born when Suzanne Stevens came to her and asked to learn how to tattoo; she obliged.  Teaching Stevens took six months and Fasulo liked it, she said.

“It just kind of found me,” she said of teaching.

Now, the program is two weeks long and has brought people from two countries and 12 states to Altamont, Fasulo said.  She draws a crowd because so few tattoo artists are willing to teach people the craft, she said. 

“Nobody wants to teach you because they are afraid you will open shop near them,” said DeJong.  All of Fasulo’s students have gone back to where they were from, she said.  Schellekens plans to go back to Holland, where she will open a tattoo parlor in the beauty shop that she has there.

Fasulo’s latest experiment is her Endangered Ink Project, which she hopes will raise $25,000 for charities that benefit endangered animals.  Since January, she’s been offering tattoos of any endangered animal a person wants for $150, all of which will be donated to a charity.  She’s done seven so far.

Since people always show off their tattoos, she figured it would be a good way to spread awareness about the extinction of species.  “It’s a neat idea to use tattoos as a platform for a cause,” she said.

Each Endangered Ink tattoo is marked with a small turtle, about the size of a ladybug, that was designed by Fasulo’s youngest child.  “I thought it was a cute way to identify that he’s part of a project,” she said, as she pointed to the turtle on Alan Barber’s leg, part of his tattoo of a rhinoceros.

She could see her youngest, who is 11, taking over the business sometime, too, said Fasulo.  She’s got a pretty big operation where she is and is thinking about opening another shop in the area, she said.

“It’s a man’s world,” said Schellekens of the tattoo culture, but Fasulo has made her mark.