YOUR SPACE: Her ‘handmade human art' adds panache for Howard Stern

It's not every nice 65-year-old woman who can make Howard Stern squirm.

But Kate Hellenbrand, better known as "Shanghai Kate," has done it several times.

She's his personal tattoo artist.

The crude radio jock recently flew her from Colorado Springs to New York to do a wedding ring tattoo on his finger. Hellenbrand did an Old English style "B" in honor of Stern's latest wife, a supermodel named Beth.

The tattoo is there until death do they part, but if the marriage doesn't last, no problem.

"He told me it is going to stand for another word that starts with ‘B' and it will remind him not to get married," she says.

Stern's not a bad guy in real life, she says. "He's not what he projects on the radio, that image of a sexist adolescent party boy. He's very serious. He's also very insecure and a germophobe. That's one reason he flies me to New York to tattoo him."

As for his bride: "She's very tolerant and knows what she is getting into."

Hellenbrand figures she's seen it all in her 37 years buzzing the needle on everyone from ordinary people to Pearl Jam band members. Skin & Ink magazine dubbed her "American's tattoo godmother." Her body is about 70 percent covered with ink.

She moved to Colorado Springs two months ago and works at Pikes Peak Tattoo on North Circle Drive.

She managed a tattoo parlor in New York City in 2000 that was selected to audition artists for a design for Stern.

"Howard's people came to our studio. They had a schematic on a tattoo for him. I said, ‘Where's Howard?'"

She prefers dealing with the person in person, not with the person's "people," and almost turned him down. Instead, she told them that Stern's design wouldn't work, anyway.

"This is a precise art, handmade human art; it's not like building a bridge. The body is not a cylindrical object. There are lots of dips and curves and imperfections," she says.
She submitted five drawings to Stern. He liked what he saw, but he couldn't make up his mind when he got in the chair.

"He had been hemming and hawing for four hours," she says. "Creative impulses come to people in the shower and isolated places. I told him, ‘Take a pee and it will come to you.'"

And it did - resulting in a dragon on his bicep. She later covered the Capricorn sign on his neck with a small religious symbol.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001.

"I was eight blocks away when the second plane hit the second tower and I stood on my roof and watched. It was a living hell," she says. "I had to get out of New York. I bought a shop in Buffalo. Last February there was a tattoo convention here at the Crowne Plaza. I fell in love with everything here - clean water, clean air. There's a good sense of community here."

She gives lectures on the anthropology of tattooing, what she calls "the art that art history forgets." (Her Web site, www.shanghaikates.com will eventually list upcoming talks.)

The farm girl from Utah figures she's done about 45,000 tattoos in a career that has spanned the globe. She was a graphic artist when she turned to tattooing and never looked back.

"Tattooing is the golden throne of human endeavor," she says. "We are the shamans of our community. We change people's lives and put their dreams and wishes and goals on the outside of their body."

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Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com