Ella Rozhko · Santa Barbara
I tattoo nipples for a living.
That is my actual line at dinner parties, and the reply is always the same: wait, you tattoo what? So here is the longer version. It starts in a dental office and takes a detour through a convention hall in Las Vegas.
Free 15-minute phone consult. To start, just text me two photos.
Before this
My first canvas was about the size of a fingernail.
For twenty years my work has been restorative dental artistry, and the part of it that is mine is the cosmetic part. The front teeth. The fillings, the polishing, the crown that has to disappear into the smile it is sitting in.
I design the tooth digitally, our milling machine cuts it in house, and then it comes out blank and white and it is my problem. I stain it. I characterize it. I paint in the small imperfections that make a tooth read as a tooth instead of a bathroom tile, then I glaze it, and it goes in the oven, and it comes out looking like it grew there.
None of that is medical care and none of it makes me anything other than the artist in the room. What it is, is two decades of matching one small thing to everything around it so closely that nobody can find the seam.
When somebody has lost a front tooth and I get the match right, they look in the mirror and say oh my God, you could never tell. Twenty years of chasing that sentence is the reason I am good at what I do now.
Ella Rozhko is a paramedical tattoo artist in Santa Barbara, California. She spent twenty years doing restorative dental artistry, matching crowns and front teeth color for color, before a 2022 permanent makeup convention in Las Vegas introduced her to areola restoration after mastectomy.
She now camouflages scars, restores areolas and belly buttons, and softens stretch marks at her studio on Hollister Avenue. The free 15-minute consult starts with a text or a call.
Paramedical tattooing is cosmetic camouflage and restoration work. Nothing in the studio is medical care.
The detour
Las Vegas, 2022.
I went to a permanent makeup convention and I heard Sherah Juarez speak about areola tattooing. Before that trip I had no idea this even existed as a thing a person could do for a living.
I was blown away. Mostly by the art, honestly. The free hand of it. The fact that you can take something completely flat and make it read as three-dimensional. And then by the part I could not stop turning over on the flight home, which is that this can make somebody feel whole again.
I came home and told my husband that was it. I no longer wanted to do eyebrows. I wanted to do nipples. He said, and I am quoting him exactly, what the hell.
Then I flew to Texas and took her in-person courses back to back, the beginner course and then the advanced one. Because I was out of town anyway, I got an extra day and an extra night with her. She was my celebrity. We are still in touch.
Same job, bigger canvas
I am the last stop.
People are frightened of dental work. Genuinely frightened, a lot of them. So calming a nervous person while doing something exacting is not a manner I picked up for this job. It is what I have done every working day for twenty years.
The other half carries over too. Somebody lost something, or something got broken, and my job is to put it back so precisely that the eye stops catching on it. With a tooth it is one tooth against the ones beside it. With skin it is your color against your color, and your skin is never one color. It is a recipe.
Where I sit in all of this is at the end. The surgery is over. The hard year is over. People arrive ready to be done with the chapter, which means I am usually the last stop, and I do not treat that casually.
The best part of the work has not changed since the first one. A person looks at themselves and they are in awe, and I get to stand there and watch it happen.
Ella's not gonna let you go until it's right.
The unreasonable part. If you ask what I am picky about, it is this: making it right. I am not going to do something halfway, and honestly I suffer from it a bit. People tell me it looks great and I am standing there thinking it could be better. It has to make sense in my head. It has to feel like complete work, like I am done here, kind of deal.
My best friend says I give myself to people too much. She is probably right about that.
Things that are true about my studio
Sade is always on. That part is not up for discussion.
Sade plays in my studio all the time and nobody has ever once complained about it. If I am in an uplifted mood you might get the yacht rock station instead. That is the entire range.
When nobody is paying me, I paint water. Ocean mostly, and rain, and every other kind of water there is. I make my kids' costumes. One year I built my son a set of vampire fangs out of dental composite and matched them to his own teeth, and his teacher, whose father was an actor, asked whether they were professional prosthetics. He told her no, they are real fillings, my mom did them.
I like flower arrangements. I like putting pieces together until they agree with each other. I love harmony, and I am fairly sure that is all one thing, and that it is the same thing I do all day.
Original paintings by Ella Rozhko.
Where the paramedical side comes from
Trained in person, then trained again.
I have a lot of certificates. The one I am proudest of is areola, and I keep taking classes, because the color science moves and I would rather move with it.
- Advanced training in areola restoration with internationally recognized paramedical artists Shay Danielle and Sherah Juarez, taken in person, beginner course and advanced course back to back
- Further coursework in scar camouflage with Jody Stoski, including the pigment and serum work that hyper-realistic camouflage depends on
- Twenty years of restorative dental precision, working in fractions of a millimeter on people who were usually nervous
- Belly button restoration after a tummy tuck or hernia repair. Rare, and my favorite thing to draw
- Microneedling for raised or textured scars, like a tummy tuck scar, to soften them so they sit closer to the skin around them. A service I really love
- Stretch mark camouflage
If you have read this far
You probably have a question about your own skin.
Send me two photos and I will tell you honestly what is possible and what is not. It costs nothing, it takes about fifteen minutes on the phone, and I have never made anybody feel silly for asking.
Keep reading
The last stop
Whatever it is, it starts with a text.
Two photos, fifteen minutes on the phone, and an honest answer. Nobody has ever regretted asking, and I have never once made someone feel silly for wondering.