Today we’d like to introduce you to Taylor Brooks.
Hi Taylor, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I grew up moving…a lot. By the time I was an adult, I had lived in four different states, and each place shaped a different part of who I am today.
I started out in Colorado, in the Denver metro area, where I went to a Montessori school for elementary. That experience, along with the generally unconventional way my parents raised my sister and me, had a huge impact on how I think and create. Curiosity was encouraged. Exploration was normal. We were taught to ask questions, follow our interests, and trust ourselves.
For middle school, my family moved to a tiny town in northwest Iowa called Pocahontas, about a mile wide by a mile wide. It was a total shift from city life. We had freedom in the truest sense: riding bikes everywhere, roaming until dark, knowing everyone in town and being known. It was a kind of grounded, communal childhood that feels rare now, and it stayed with me.
High school brought another move, this time to Edmond, just outside Oklahoma City. During my later teen years, I struggled with substance abuse, which eventually led to an intervention by my parents and getting clean. Throughout all of that, art was the one constant. I had always been creatively gifted, and my parents supported that deeply, along with something else that was just as important to me: spirituality.
My sister and I were raised in an alternative spiritual environment where we were allowed to explore many belief systems and decide for ourselves what resonated. My mom noticed early on that I had intuitive and paranormal sensitivities, things like sensing presences or energy in spaces. Over time, that awareness developed into a relationship with divination, intuitive work, and spiritual practice. It was never about fantasy for me; it was about understanding people, cycles, and the unseen layers of life.
In my twenties, I moved to my parents’ organic farm and homestead in the Ozarks of southern Missouri. My then-wife and I built our own tiny house and lived off the grid for almost eight years. I made money through creative work while helping on the farm, growing and providing organic produce to the local community. That period gave me space, real space, to study metaphysics, alchemy, anthropology, and ancient ritual practices. I became especially interested in how people across history have used mark-making, symbols, and the body to honor transition, loss, love, and survival.
When a long-term relationship ended and an engagement was called off right as my Saturn return began, my life went through a major restructuring. I returned more deeply to doing readings and shadow counseling, and I found my way back to art—but this time it was guided directly by divination and spiritual inspiration. My creative work stopped being just about making something beautiful and became about meaning and witnessing.
Eventually, that path brought me to Kansas City, and unexpectedly, to tattooing. I sought out a tattoo artist to receive a grieving tattoo I designed for myself, inspired by ancient ritual traditions meant to mark loss, love, and transformation on the body. During that session, we talked for hours about my background, my art, and my spiritual work. She told me then that if I ever wanted an apprenticeship, I had one waiting.
A year later, I took her up on it. I completed my tattoo apprenticeship in about six months and am now finalizing my licensing paperwork. This spring, I’ll be moving to a lesbian-owned, LGBTQ-affirming cooperative space called MOC BOD, where I’ll be tattooing full time.
Today, my work centers on ritual tattooing intentional, story-based tattoos created through collaboration, symbolism, and spiritual insight. These pieces draw from ancient traditions, divination practices, and the belief that marking the body can be a powerful way to honor where we’ve been and who we’re becoming. My life has taken me across landscapes, belief systems, and identities, but the through-line has always been the same: art as a way of making meaning, healing, and remembering.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No, it hasn’t been a smooth road. But it has been a beautiful one.
One of the things studying alchemy teaches you is that suffering isn’t a detour from the path; it is the path. The pressure, the breaking, the dissolving. Those are the forces that shape who you become. When I look back now, I genuinely can’t see any other way I could have arrived here as the person I am, with the understanding, compassion, and depth I carry. Every challenge was a doorway into the timeline I’m living now.
That doesn’t mean it was easy. I divorced young, at 23, and later went through another deeply painful relationship that fell apart. For a long time, I centered my partners more than myself, and those heartbreaks forced me to confront who I was outside of them. Losing love taught me how to value it properly. It taught me autonomy, sovereignty, and how to become the woman I actually am, not who I was trying to be for someone else.
I’ve also lived through darker chapters. Substance abuse in my teens and early adulthood showed me many sides of life, including parts of myself I had to reckon with. I’ve survived sexual assault, suicidal ideation, and periods where staying alive felt like an active choice. Those experiences cracked me open in ways that were terrifying, but they also deepened my empathy and my ability to sit with others in their pain without turning away.
My twenties were shaped by illness as well. I struggled with Lyme disease for much of that decade, which forced me to slow down and listen to my body in ways I never had before. Living off-grid on my parents’ farm became a kind of medicine, quiet, grounded, and necessary. I don’t think I could have healed, physically or emotionally, without that long period of simplicity and distance from the world.
Eventually, though, staying there would have meant disappearing. It took what felt like a walk straight into the unknown, a total upheaval and a move to Kansas City, to bring me here. That leap changed everything. Looking back, I can see that every breaking point, every loss, every dark night was shaping my capacity to create, to love, and to hold meaning for others.
It hasn’t been smooth. But it’s been real. And I wouldn’t trade the road I walked for any other.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
At the core of my work, I am a divinator and a shadow guide. I’ve been working professionally in that capacity for over ten years. Earlier in my life, I did paranormal work, but I intentionally stepped away from that path. My focus now is on the living, on people, their stories, their pain, and their becoming.
Alongside that, I’ve studied alchemy, ritual, and deity work for just as long. Alchemy, especially, shapes how I understand transformation. It teaches that nothing is wasted: emotion, grief, rage, love, and loss are all raw materials. My work is about helping people alchemize those experiences into clarity, power, and sovereignty.
I’ve also been an artist my entire life. Creativity was recognized and nurtured early by my parents and through my education, and it has always been one of my primary ways of understanding the world. Art, for me, isn’t decorative, it’s communicative. It’s a language for things that can’t be spoken directly.
What I specialize in is guiding people through hard seasons. Shadow work is central to my practice: helping others meet the parts of themselves they were taught to avoid, repress, or fear, and transforming those parts into strength. My goal is always the same, to help people reclaim their agency, their wholeness, and their right to exist fully as themselves.
Tattooing is now the medium through which all of that comes together. I approach tattoos as ritual and as embodied storytelling. The metals in tattoo ink are not so different from an alchemist’s tools, materials that bind intention to form. My process is intentionally slow and relational. I work with clients over multiple sessions, beginning with a reading and a deep dive into their life, their wounds, and their triumphs. From there, I create a custom design that reflects their story, their symbolism, and what they are integrating or releasing.
The tattoo session itself is held as a safe, grounded space, one where emotion is welcome, where people are allowed to feel fully without being rushed or minimized. The act of marking the body becomes a way of honoring what has been survived, what has been loved, and what is being claimed.
What I’m most proud of is the trust people place in me at some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. What sets my work apart is that it doesn’t stop at aesthetics. Every piece is about meaning, presence, and transformation. I don’t just tattoo images. I help people carry their stories with intention, dignity, and power. And hopefully create something beautiful from something that hurt.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs or other resources you think our readers should check out?
I am a book fiend so pretty much all things science fiction or fantasy keep my creative juices flowing. A book that really impacted me early in life though was the “Four Agreements”. It is always a recommend, and also “Women Who Run with the Wolves”. The Duncan Trussel Family Hour is always a good one to get my mind going, as well as the Moon Matters podcasts.
Pricing:
- $600 for half day sessions (normal for a ritual tattoo)
- $800 for full day
- $80 minimum unless running specials
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/taythelionqueen
- Instagram: @_alchemical_ink
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TaytheLionQueen
