Archive Note
Born Bev Robinson in 1942 and later known as Bev Nicholas, she was a young farm worker with no tattooed people in her family when in 1959 the photographer Harry Bartram offered to pay for her to be tattooed and to promote her as a tattooed pin-up under the stage name Cindy Ray. Through the 1960s she toured Australia and New Zealand as "the Classy Lassie with the Tattooed Chassis" and "Miss Technicolor," with her name attached to books, tattoo machines, and jewelry kits, and her papers from this period are held by the National Library of Australia. She then moved from being a tattooed model to being a working tattooist, one of Australia's pioneering women in the trade, spending her career in Melbourne and running the Moving Pictures Tattoo Studio in Williamstown, Victoria. She was inducted into the Tattoo Hall of Fame at the Lyle Tuttle Tattoo Art Museum in 2005 and died on July 13, 2025, a foundational figure for Australian tattoo history and for women in the trade.
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