“How many tattoos do you have?” I ask Selena Garlow, the owner of Emerald City Tattoo. She’s wearing a black sundress with spaghetti straps and I can see all manner of ink on her, from spider webs and dream catchers encircling her arm to a crescent moon and Luna moth on the front of her neck. “Oh, we’re well past that stage,” she replies while adjusting a device that looks like a fat pen with an inch-long nubbin. “I’d say about 70 percent of my body is covered now.”
It’s 10:00 in the morning on a Spring day in Castlegar and the sun is streaming through the front door and window. I’m lying on a thin massage-style table and about to embark on one of the most interesting interviews I’ve ever done in my journalistic career by asking more questions of Selena while she gives me a tattoo. Actually, she’s updating the one tattoo I got when I was 20 years old by adding colour and my kids’ names to it. The tool she’s using looks very benign compared to the tattoo gun I remember from my first time around, and when the nubbin touches my skin it almost tickles before turning into a mild scratching sensation.
Her studio space is also very different from what I’d expect: Emerald City Tattoo is like a small pocket of calm in Castlegar, a space that, despite its black painted walls, feels playful and welcoming. There are no skeletons leering overhead or death metal blasting in the background. Instead, multiple mirrors in gilded frames hang on one wall while colourful paintings of clowns and dog heads hang on the other. It’s also clean inside, almost surgically so. Overall, the studio reflects its owner’s belief that getting tattooed should feel safe and even a little magical. “I didn’t want anything that was textbook tattoo,” Selena says. “I didn’t want skulls and spiders and all that. I wanted something playful and inspiring. I really do think this should be a fun experience, even though you’re getting poked and prodded.”
Selena’s connection to Emerald City goes back much further than the shop itself. As a child, she remembers sneaking into her parents’ bedroom and discovering what, to her, felt like a relic of royalty: her mother’s emerald-green satin nightgown trimmed with black lace. “I thought it was the most luxurious looking thing I’d ever seen,” she says. “I never saw anything more beautiful than that.” She would put it on with her mother’s jewelry and pretend she was a queen, an image that stayed with her for years. When it came time to name her tattoo studio, that memory resurfaced and she went with it.
Born in Grande Prairie, Selena moved around frequently in her youth and was raised between northern Alberta and the West Kootenay region. She spent time in Salmo before eventually settling in Castlegar, a place she now considers home. “Every day I wake up in this beautiful place and feel very, very lucky,” she says. “I’ve met so many good people here and I just couldn’t be happier.”
Like the move to Castlegar, her path into tattooing took time. As a teenager, she was told she was too young to apprentice and had to wait. It wasn’t until her early twenties, after becoming a mother, that she committed fully. “I was 21 or 22 when I started thinking, I want to do this. I want to learn and figure this out.”
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Her break came through mentorship, a traditional route in an industry that still values hands-on learning. When tattoo artist Danny Cole entered her life in Grande Prairie, he gave her a chance and promptly dismantled everything she thought she knew. “He wasn’t easy, but he was awesome,” she says. “We became fast friends.” That relationship shaped how she now runs her own business: the people in the room matter as much as the art on the skin. She says she’s built a family at Emerald City, a group of artists who value kindness, professionalism, and respect.
This is because tattooing is as much emotional work as it is technical skill, she continues. People arrive with stories, grief, joy, trauma, and memories. “Everybody’s going through something,” Selena says. “As fun as it is, it’s not always fun.” She speaks candidly about the weight of listening, of connecting deeply with people who have lost others and who get tattoos that are like markers in time. As proof, she tells me about the next client who she’ll see that day and how she battled breast cancer. She is getting a tattoo to remember the fight.
Of course, not every moment is heavy. Tattooing is filled with humour, absurdity, and stories that could only happen in a tattoo shop. Selena laughs as she remembers trying to tattoo a client whose leg kept twitching uncontrollably. In a moment of desperation, she climbed onto the woman’s calf to hold it still. “Danny walked in, shook his head and said, ‘you’re not supposed to straddle your clients.’ We all started laughing,” she recalls. In another story, she mentions her son who drew a voodoo doll and then tattooed it onto her left calf. He was only 10 at the time!
As our session comes to a close, Selena hands me a mirror and shows me the updates to my tattoo, which include the names of my sons. I marvel at how good it looks and then say, “This was a very different experience from what I was expecting.” She replies, “I like the idea of changing how people see the tattoo community. We’re not always what people think.”
Emerald City Tattoo is truly a unique space in Castlegar that is quietly expanding the artistic fabric of this city one tattoo and one conversation at a time.