When Angel Moon opened the Queen of Hearts parlor back in 1993, tattooing was an insular subculture — one that wasn’t always friendly to women artists or shop owners.
That meant Angel had to be pretty tough, and a little unconventional. She took her craft extremely seriously, and was proud of her careful linework. But those who knew her also describe her as deeply caring, the kind of person who became fast friends with customers and took fledgling tattoo artists under her wing.
Now, as her daughters prepare to celebrate the shop’s 30th anniversary, they’re thinking about their mom’s legacy and what it was like to grow up in a tattoo parlor.
No one was surprised when Crystal Harris took over the Queen of Hearts from her mother in 2014. She grew up here, with all the customers stretched out in the chairs and the cases of body jewelry and the walls plastered with the artists’ flash.
“The tattoo machine is almost like a lullaby for both of us,” she said.
In fact, most of Harris’ memories of her mom take place in a tattoo parlor.
“I mean, she worked seven days a week,” she said.
For over 20 years, the Queen of Hearts has lived in a small, gray house just off a busy stretch of Nolensville Pike. But before that, it was located in the back of a pool hall in Radcliff, Kentucky.
“I’d go up there all the time on the weekends with my father and play pool and hang out with my mom. So that was the time I actually got family time,” she said.
Harris learned to tattoo at her mother’s knee. Angel even did her first tattoo, a mama and baby dolphin on her ankle. And even as a kid, Crystal knew her mom was a little different.
“I remember walking through the grocery store back in the ’90s, and my mom being so heavily tattooed that people would actually grab their children and detour around us, you know, thinking that my mom was like the plague, or she was going to steal their children or something.”
But she pretty much always knew she wanted to follow in her mom’s footsteps. And she wasn’t the only one in the family who followed suit.
Harris’ younger sister, Dixie Lugo, is the Queen’s piercer. When she was a baby, Angel put her in a playpen in the back room while she worked.
But Lugo didn’t always want to join the family business.
“Growing up, I was like, ‘Man, I’m never going to do this, and I want to be like a vet or something crazy,’” she said.
For Angel, the shop and tattooing sometimes had to come first, and she always kept her girls by her side. That meant missing out on birthday parties and holidays.
“Oh, as a kid, I was pissed. I was so pissed as a kid, I was like, ‘Man, why do we have to miss everything?’” Lugo said.
Eventually, she came around. Lugo fell in love with the art of piercing and the way that adding just a little bit of sparkle could make her clients more confident in their own skin.
Another big part of it was realizing, in retrospect, everything her mom had to go through to become and hold her place as one of the few well-known women tattoo artists and shop owners in the entire country in the 1990s.
At one convention, one of Angel’s tattoos, a rose and tribal design on a woman’s hip, had caused quite a buzz. Photographers were snapping pics, and everyone wanted to meet the artist.
“One of the photographers was literally looking and searching for it, like, ‘Where is this artist at?’ And as soon as he found out it was a woman, not a male, he literally took his roll of film and pretty much opened it and destroyed all the photos because he said that he would not photograph or publish a woman in their magazine,” she said.
Aaron Richards, who worked for Angel for over a decade, said that things were a lot different back then.
Now, Richards is an artist at Rebel Yell, a tattoo shop just up the road from Queen of Hearts. He got his start with the Queen herself, at her first shop up in Kentucky. When Angel decided to shut that location down to focus on the one in Nashville in 1997, she took Richards with her.
“She came up to the Radcliff shop, and she got us all together and she was like, ‘Anybody want to move to Nashville?’ So, you know, she rented us a U-Haul, and we packed up all of our stuff and moved down here and went to work,” he said.
Angel was such a prominent figure in the tattoo scene that the Tennessee Health Department sought her out for feedback when the time came to draft up the first-ever state regulations on the tattoo industry.
She brought tattoo shop owners from across the state together to help shape the new rules.
“Somehow, she got them all to agree. I mean, these are literally people who would never want to be in the same room with each other beforehand without fighting,” Richards said. “Somehow, she managed to wrangle them together and keep a lid on them and keep them professional enough so that the health board didn’t run away screaming when they met with them.”
Rose Gilbert WPLN News Aaron Richards at Rebel Yell
Richards will always remember Queen of Hearts as the place he grew up.
“I moved there when I was in my very early 20s, and I was a pretty inexperienced tattooer. By no means was there anything special. When I left there, I was a pretty well-known tattooer. I was very confident in my skills. I had a family at that point, and Angel was a part of that,” he said.
“She took care of us, you know, like we were her little chicks.”
A lot has changed since the Queen first opened its doors. Tattooing is much more regulated, and women artists and shop owners are a lot more common. For Harris, the change in clientele has been a big shift.
Back in the day, she says, tattoos were mostly sported by rebels, outcasts and military types.
“Now, everybody has them. Even my gynecologist comes here and gets tattooed,” she said.
She says she sees all sorts coming through her chair, which is located right in the middle of the same cramped room in the back of the shop where her mom used to work.
Angel Moon passed away in 2014 due to complications from dementia. Her visitation was held in the same shop where she built her name, with her favorite song playing over the speakers: “Desperado” by the Eagles.
Lugo was blown away by the turnout that day.
“That was the moment when I really understood what my mom had done for the industry. Seeing all these, you know, big biker guys heavily tattooed come in and pay this woman respect, when that’s how she got her start was countless rejections and camera rolls in the trash and being told that she’d never amount to anything,” Lugo said.
“Seeing even in her passing that she was still able to bring back so many people and bring so many artists together for that moment to say, ‘You changed me and you helped shape me,’ was probably one of those proudest moments I have.”
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