Allie Menchaca knew she wanted to be a tattoo artist when she was in the fifth grade at Midway’s South Bosque Elementary School. At the time, milky gel pens were all the rage. They were great for writing and drawing on dark paper, but Menchaca and her classmates discovered that the pens did an equally nice job on skin.
“And everybody would get their gel pens and take them to school and draw on themselves,” Menchaca said. “Everybody liked the way I drew on myself. They were like, ‘I want you to draw on me.’ So I ended up making a book and having people pick out designs and pay with quarters at lunch. Everybody was going home drawn on.”
Menchaca’s Christmas wish list was filled with “paper, pens, markers, paint, and so I’ve always painted,” she said. She discovered a love for acrylic paint while in Joan Warren’s art classes at Midway High School.
“She really taught us a lot, and I think just being able to sit in her classroom and paint whatever we wanted to, not necessarily have assignments, we were just creating, I think that helped me build my love for that specific medium,” Menchaca said. “She also taught me about paint pens, because I love paint pens and add them into my acrylic work. All the crisp lines, those are all paint pens.”
Menchaca has several of her acrylic paintings on the walls of her space at Embrace the Chaos, a tattoo studio at 728 Washington Ave. Her largest painting in Waco is a mural in The BLVD Steakhouse, inside the Cambria Hotel.
“It’s a pretty long wall of flowers,” she said. “It has crape myrtle trees and dandelions, and there’s a lotus and magnolias and all kinds of bluebonnets and some other flowers in there. It’s pretty, and just fits the room there really nicely.”
Though she’s creating art whether she’s painting or tattooing, Menchaca enjoys both mediums but for different reasons.
Tattooing, she said, brings immediate satisfaction, though the definition of “immediate” can vary. She worked on one client’s leg sleeve — a continuous tattoo from the hip down to the ankle — for a year, two hours at a time every three or four weeks.
“I’m doing it right then and there,” she said. “I really love being with the client and talking and having a good time and getting to know them. A lot of times they’ll open up to me, and then we kind of forge a really deep friendship.”
Painting, Menchaca said, forces her to slow down.
“All my paintings are very layered, so I have to wait for each layer to dry before I can go on to the next bit of it. That forces me to look at my work come together so much slower. Maybe I’m not in the same headspace that I was when I started it as whenever I finished it. It can really turn into something that I maybe didn’t intend for it to and it’s kind of fun watching that come together.”
So how many tattoos does Menchaca herself have?
“I don’t know,” she said. There are many, but she does know which one is her favorite.
“It’s a rotting fish with the bones and the flesh kind of coming off,” she said, laughing. “It’s very colorful. A lot of a weird transitioning of colors, which is something you don’t really see a lot. I really love all the different details. There’s circles in circles and just a different style of tattooing. How the line weights change from one side of the line to the next is really cool to me.”
That tattoo was done by her friend Patrick Tierney, owner of Acorn Tattoo in Salem, Massachusetts, where Menchaca works for a while each year.
“I go to Salem for the fall season to work the rush,” she said. “Everybody goes there for Halloween and for the spooky vibes. It’s an insane time. It’s wall-to-wall people. We can’t even get to all the people who want to get a tattoo, and there’s four of us in the shop.”
Tattoos by Allie
Allie Menchaca’s tattoo work can be seen on her Instagram page, @TattoosByAllieMenchaca. Her paintings can be seen on the ‘Gram at @ArtByAllieMenchaca. She’s been tattooing for 10 years and has been at Embrace the Chaos since May 2024. She was a professional tattoo artist for about four years, and then took a break to raise her children. After some time working as a machinist, and also really getting into painting, she started tattooing again about six years ago.
