After Julie’s high school graduation when she was 18, she thought of becoming a tattoo artist. She had always been a creative soul, and she was drawn to the art form. As a first step, Julie knew that she would need an apprenticeship in a tattoo studio. After putting together all her best drawings in a folder, she visited a tattoo studio in Munich, introducing herself and showing them her work.
But they rejected me, saying my art wasn’t good enough and that I could forget pursuing a tattooing career. That was a real big slap in the face for me. I was completely devastated and discouraged.
But Julie’s creative side was too strong to give up; she never stopped making art, and she trained in several different art forms. As of December 2025, she is not only a tattoo artist, but also a creator of nature-inspired psychedelic drawings and paintings, of quirky little magical mushroom wizards hand-carved from avocado pits, and of so many other things that are unique and lovingly detailed.
Tens of thousands of people follow Julie’s art online, and thousands own her prints or feature her custom artworks on the most precious canvases they own – their skin. In this feature, we explore her journey from that initial moment of unjustified rejection to a voyage of artistic discovery, culminating in a triumphant demonstration that her art was, after all, good enough, and more than good enough. Like a walk through an enchanted forest, Julie did get to her destination in the end, and she also enjoyed – and continues to enjoy – her several detours through other artistic forms and pursuits.
The Journey To Tattooing: A Dream Come True
After the initial tattoo studio rejection, Julie resolved to keep making art. She applied to an apprenticeship position as a porcelain painter, and she was accepted. For the next three years, she steadily became better at creating the finest designs on the delicate porcelain medium, until she gained the ability to focus intensely on an intricate piece of art with a steady hand and eye.
Once her apprenticeship period ended, Julie went traveling. Her travels took her to Berlin, where she met a tattoo artist whose work inspired her. That chance meeting reminded her of her unfulfilled wish to learn tattooing, and she picked up a few pointers from him, watching as he tattooed others.
Even then, she didn’t have the confidence to start tattooing on her own. She needed the final push, the big moment of inspiration.
And that came during one of the most wholesome and beautiful periods of her life, during a women’s retreat hosted by her friend Daisha. One of the focus areas during the retreat was starting and scaling a business, and this was the impetus Julie needed to finally realize her dream of creating tattoos for people.
She bought a tattoo machine soon after and began practicing on fake skin.
And the Universe and the Goddess made sure that Julie would soon get to create tattoos on real skin. Towards the end of 2024, a friend got in touch, saying that she wanted Julie to tattoo her.
She made me a beautiful macrame necklace in return and I could finally create on real skin! Then a good friend of mine who always loved my art, offered me to practice on his leg. So grateful to have supportive friends like this!!
This was the genesis of Julie’s signature style of mushroom tattoos, and the style came together, again, by serendipity. When she started the mushroom tattoo on her friend’s leg, she knew that she didn’t just want to create a normal realistic mushroom, but one that was a little trippy, with crazy patterns and swirls. He loved the outcome, as did Julie, as did all those who saw the finished tattoo in person and on social media.
As more and more people came to Julie, asking for tattoos in “her style”, she knew that she had finally realized her dream of becoming a tattoo artist whose work moved people deeply.
It’s been less than a year since Julie started tattooing, and her rate of progress is much faster than the average. She credits her years of experience as a fine porcelain painter, an entire lifetime of drawing and painting experience, and her steady hand-eye coordination for her ability to pick up the skill quickly.
This art form really resonates with me, since the moment I started I feel like it’s the thing I wanna do! Not only can I create, but also make people so happy with what I do! Their gratitude gives me SO much.
Julie’s Tattoo Art: Themes and Development
Julie creates art in many forms, and her personality and interests shine through in all of them. Her tattoos, too, are delicately detailed, simple yet complex, and feel as if they are channeling the healing power and eternal beauty of nature directly to the skin of the subject.
One of Julie’s favorite tattoo designs is one inspired by the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke. The design is a fascinating mixture of the trademark Ghibli art style and Julie’s lush stems, winding tendrils, and swaying leaves. This particular piece is still in progress and we can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
Some of Julie’s favorite tattoos feature mushrooms, and they’re always slender and delicate and twisty; they feel more like a piece of the forest organically growing on the subject’s skin rather than like external tattoos. The stems of these mushroom tattoos are especially interesting, looking like leaf stalks rather than comparatively thick mushroom stipes. And there is also internal detail; tiny shapes and designs interlock to create these stems, like vertical scripts stack their intricate glyphs one above the other to create a sinuous, beautiful, dancing whole.
When you look at one of the tattoos that Julie has created, you get the feeling that you get when you see a particularly wonderful light-shade effect that a ray from the sun creates on skin, or when you see an ornamental arrangement of leaves and flowers adorning a person’s body. They are natural, subtle, and unforgettable.
“Wonderland”
“Wonderland” is one of Julie’s most powerfully psychedelic pieces. It is a trippy depiction of Alice, one that contains both darkness and light, one that will leave the viewer soaring on heights comparable to those experienced by the drawing’s subject.
The most interesting thing about “Wonderland” is how faithful it is to the source material. There is the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the mushrooms, the White Rabbit. Fans of Lewis Carroll’s work who have taken a look back in their adulthood and identified grown-up themes in the book will find many small details that they have known and loved since childhood.
So many works of art have been inspired by Alice and her Wonderland. To us, @jukaykala’s drawing feels a lot like Jefferson Airplane’s immortal “White Rabbit”, the psychedelic rock classic that first asked you to imagine Alice when she was ten feet tall. Both deal with altered states; both induce a feeling of peace while still containing unsettling, darker undertones; both are uniquely creative tributes to one of the most imaginative stories of all time.
“Wonderland” is also unique in that it reimagines Alice as a nature goddess, a woodland sprite. This is also in keeping with the source material: the story of Alice is full of intricate descriptions of natural flora and fauna.
Julie’s “Wonderland” feels like a love letter to nature: the diversity of fungi on display is truly breathtaking (pun intended). Even Alice’s hair feels like a wisp of smoke that you might see rising from a woodland dell, and the White Rabbit feels as much like a creature of the forest as his original incarnation – that of a stuffy bureaucratic figure perpetually afraid of being late. Branches and leaves wrap Alice in their loving embrace: she is cocooned in nature, completely at peace, a dryad.
The piece can also be viewed as a visual parallel to the World Tree in various traditions, from Yggdrasil onwards. In keeping with her giant size when she drank the wrong potion, Alice could be seen as encompassing All of Creation, with every living being visible within her infinite expanse.
And yet, there is an undercurrent of darkness. “Wonderland” occupies a unique place among Julie’s other works in that the main character isn’t completely happy, isn’t completely at bliss in nature. Her closed eyes are testament to her pensive state of mind, and there is an air of mystery about this version of Alice, one that will make you want to go down the rabbit hole and find out more.
This drawing emerged when I was in kind of a dark place, wasn’t feeling too good and numbing myself with various substances seeking distraction. I usually draw magical fairy girls, happy beings because that’s my usual state of mind. During this period of darkness my art became darker too. I’m grateful for this period, bc even though I wasn’t happy, it still made me create this piece.
When you look at this piece through the lenses of both light and darkness, the duotoned hair becomes a metaphor for the struggle between radiance and shadow, and the twining branches could be seen as constraining rather than lovingly hugging. Even the caterpillar, upon close examination, has a face that is almost fiendish in its intensity and disapproval. The piece admits multiple interpretations, and that is its power.
The Magical Mushroom Wizard Carvings
A lot of Julie’s art can be described as magical, but possibly the most magical of her pieces are her little mushroom wizards, carved by hand out of carefully chosen avocado pits. After all, how can you get more magical than a hybrid of the most magical human archetype that exists (a wise old wizard) and the most magical thing that grows on or under the earth (a mushroom)?
The idea for the magical mushroom dudes came to Julie during her travels in New Zealand in 2019. She was accompanied by two close friends, and one of them was a hobbyist wood carver. She decided to use his carving knives to try to create a wooden spoon, but it took her forever and left her with an aching hand. She loved the idea of carving intricate shapes, though, and decided to try again with a softer material.
Again, serendipity struck. Avocados were on the menu a lot during that trip to NZ, and Julie realized that the pits had the perfect mix of hardness and yieldingness that she was looking for. Since they were approximately spherical, she decided to try carving a mushroom, and her first experiment bore fruit – well, they bore fungi.
And then she decided to take it one step further. She has always loved creating portraits, loved reflecting a bit of the soul of a person in her art. She added faces to her carved avocado pit mushrooms, and the mushroom wizards came into being, birthed by happy accident and creativity.
The carvings have some similarities but also infinite little feature differences that make each piece unique. Most of them are designed to be worn as pendant necklaces, and feature the bearded face of a wizard with a semicircular hat that makes him look like a were-mushroom. The mushroom hats usually have one gleaming gemstone in them.
But there the similarities end. Every lock of hair in the beard feels different every time, the eyes convey different levels of repose even when closed, and the textured pattern of the avocado pit surface and its color add a unique personality to each mushroom hat. When you realize that Julie spent years learning how to render hyper-detailed designs on porcelain, it makes complete sense that her mushroom wizards are as perfect as they are (you can see all of them on the jukaykala Instagram Page), and as unique as they are, even though they are tiny.
Process: The small sorcerers take shape subsequent to six steps:
1. Choosing the right pit: Over time, Julie has come to realize that the pits she uses must have exactly the right consistency. This is impacted by their age: not too fresh, not too old. She always aims for the level of feel of a linoleum printing stamp.
Every pit is different, you gotta find the right timing between when enough liquid has evaporated that it’s dry enough but not rubberlike and not too dry because then it’s too hard to carve.
2. Making the Mushroom: Before the face comes the fungus; Julie always carves a rough mushroom shape with a thick stem so that she has more material than she needs for her face carving.
3. Adding the Facial Features: The mushroom stem becomes the canvas to carve out the nose, eyes, and beard; the differences in these add unique personalities to the wizards.
4. Making the Hat Shine: The top of the mushroom – the hat of the wizard – gets its own gemstone after the face down below has taken shape.
5. Waiting: Julie leaves each mushroom wizard on his own for a day or two.
6. The Final Touches: In the end, Julie adds fine details to the face and hat before coating the newly created wizard in wood wax, all ready to begin his journey to his new home, to wander the world, which is what all wizards do.
Our favorite thing about these works of art is that, if you own one of them, you can say the words “I’m wearing a magical mushroom hat wizard as a pendant carved from the pit of a superfruit”. How many times in your life do you ever get to say a sentence that is as wildly imaginative as that?!
Julie’s magical mushroom wizards are majestic yet cute, impossibly old yet impossibly young, serious yet joyful.
“BLOOM”
“BLOOM” has a long history; it was a drawing that later became a large canvas painting. It represents a recurring theme in Julie’s work: that of the fairy princess in harmony with all living things. This particular piece takes the visual metaphor to its logical conclusion, depicting the inner growth of a person in a particular situation.
In exactly the same way in which a plant can share its magical gift of growth and life with the world even when left as a seed within dark soil that may not provide adequate nourishment, we humans can create beauty and flourish in any environment. “BLOOM” shows this through strong visual shorthand, with fresh buds sprouting, new leaves coming to life, little roots seeking to establish a presence, and butterflies nesting in the main character’s hair. She has become part of her surroundings, bringing grace, vitality, and energy to her world.
“BLOOM” was initially created by Julie as a drawing; a few months later, she found the perfect title for the piece when she came across the quote: “Wherever life plants you, bloom with grace.”
The canvas painting I created a while later; initially it was a commission which was partly even paid for, but the person who commissioned me had deleted his account before I finished it and I didn’t have any chance to contact him otherwise. Which annoyed me a bit first, but then I was grateful, too. Because if he hadn’t requested that I repainted this drawing on a large canvas, this artwork would’ve never emerged. And it’s one of my favorites that I have done so far!
The artistry of “BLOOM” reminds us that humans and nature were not intended to be two separate entities. Roots, shoots, leaves, flowers – all these grow from the subject of the drawing as naturally as hair or nails grow on humans. The butterflies nest in her hair with as much happiness as they would amidst a field of flowers.
It is a reminder to us to find places where we feel safe and loved, and to allow ourselves to bloom in those places. It also exemplifies the celebration of the sacred feminine in Julie’s work, displaying how much freedom and ecstasy there can be when a goddess experiences total immersion in the warmth and beauty of the natural world.
I often create artworks that celebrate the sacred feminine. I’m continually inspired by the strength of women, the importance of sisterhood and the natural beauty of the female form: soft, graceful, and powerful all at once.
Today, “BLOOM” watches over Julie’s studio, a reminder to her to nourish her soul, to put out roots and leaves, to flourish and bloom.
Julie would like to thank…
…her friends, family, and supporters on Instagram.
Their support means the world to me and is a big part of the reason I’ve never stopped creating and developing my art. Also each and every one of my customers, and my followers on Instagram, they all contribute to my path and passion. Without them I wouldn’t be able to pursue my passion like I do. I’m so so grateful to everyone supporting me and making my dream come true!
Links
Julie Katherine – jukaykala – Art Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/jukaykala/.
Julie Katherine – jukaykala – Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/JukayKala.