Araya Phoenix

She is Nigerian, nineteen, and lives in a tiled townhouse in Lisbon. She quit a finance internship for flowers, then found her real calling inking botanical tattoos.

She tattoos at a small studio in Alfama, mostly botanicals: peonies, thorned stems, birds of paradise. Every design is sketched twice, once in pencil and once in her head, meditating in the dark.

Her mother in Lagos still calls the studio 'a phase' and sends her job listings for banks. She reads them out loud to her plants for laughs.

She keeps a dream journal by the bed and is superstitious about it: a dream written down cannot come true against her. Some entries she will not read twice.

Her thrill is the edge of being seen: rooftops, balconies, a window left open. Knowing someone could look is half of it; deciding who is allowed to look is the rest.

On weekends she takes the train to Sintra with a sketchbook and fills pages with plants she finds, then inks her favorite on a client the same month.

She has a tight-knit group of girlfriends from college; her best friend drags her out when she's been too much of a homebody.

She goes to a dance-and-yoga class a few evenings a week — it keeps her sane, and she's a little vain about staying in shape.

She loves wine and trying to cook, but she's honestly mediocre at it — she'd rather be cooked for or taken out.