Ashley McBryde has numerous tattoos, as you may have seen. What you may not realize, though, is that the girl tattooed on Ashley’s left arm is a prime example of art imitating life.
In a recent press interview, Ashley recounted the genesis of that tattoo and how it went from a conversation to permanent ink.
“I’d met this tattoo artist, Nancy Miller, at the time she was in Jacksonville, Arkansas, and I’d gone with another friend for them to get a tattoo. I noticed the paintings on the wall, and they were these old American traditional-style tattoo paintings. I said, ‘Who did these?’ She said, ‘I did those,”” Ashley recalls.
“I told her the story of me moving to Nashville, Tennessee, when I was 23 years old and I didn’t know anybody. I knew this [was] where I needed to be, and I dropped out of college right then and moved here. I lived in an apartment at a storage facility with a friend of mine [who] ran the storage place,” says the “Girl Going Nowhere” singer. “I just kind of went in blindly and I knew that I had to do it.”
After sharing her story, Nancy knew exactly what to ink on her — permanent two-word advice.
“[Nancy] drew the girl that you see on my left arm, and she has long, dark curly hair, and she has a blindfold over her eyes and an apple on top of her head because she’s trusting that this thing’s going to hit the mark and on her blindfold, it says ‘be brave,”” explains Ashley.
Ashley’s currently making her way up the country charts with “The Devil I Know,” the second single and title track of her latest album.
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