I’m not a very good animal activist. I have devoted not one hour of my time to streaking in the name of animal rights. I don’t pass out PETA booklets with images of bloody eyed cows. I can’t rattle off the names of every germ found in a fast food burger. I have no idea how many animals I save a year by eating vegan. And quite honestly, I don’t think picketing looks good on me. I do however have that aching for the little guy, the ones always getting kicked around. I think they call that compassion, some sort of inherent trait that weighs on all animal lovers.

At the tender age of ten that compassion thing got the best of me and I became a vegetarian after seeing one of those PETA booklets the ones with the bloody eyed cows. Many peanut butter sandwiches later I learned about the animal rights movement and eating vegan. The idea of living a cruelty free lifestyle intrigued me but going vegan seemed silly, because as we know, not eating any animal products means immediate and certain death. Oh, for the lack of protein. At seventeen they got me anyway and I became a marching solider of the vegan army.

Some three years later I decided eradicating all animal products from my diet wasn’t good enough, I wanted to be a flag-waving member. This to me meant tattoo time. For this, I thought to myself, if I’m going to profess my love for the animal world, let’s do it up, let’s do it in front of a couple million people. So I applied to be on the ever-popular show Miami Ink. I think it’s seen in something like five thousand countries. Because of this the producers get a couple hundred applications to be on the show a day and for some reason the story of a suburban gal from the Midwest trying to go against the grain caught their fancy. This would become my first official form of activism. So off I went from Minneapolis to Miami dragging my friend and fellow vegan Sara with me. Sara does not watch Miami Ink but is rather a better representation of what generally comes to mind when people think “fucking hippie vegans”. She was a must for this trip.

Sara and I arrive at the green room behind the tattoo shop at about ten in the morning, signed our rights away, met the other clients for the day and watched early Star Trek episodes for the next six hours while waiting. I did my on-camera tattoo consultation with Chris Garver during this time also. Garver is by far the best artist on the show. I am lucky for getting him.

From opening to nine at night, Monday through Friday, Miami Ink is a set and is not open to the public, but the producers tell you, “There is no show. Don’t look at the camera. Don’t talk about the show.” So when I meet Garver for the first time and the cameras are flipped on and he starts talking to me like he already knows what my tattoo design is because it’s been pre-approved months ago, I desperately gasp for reality. What is he talking about? There is no show. Aren’t we acting? What’s going on? As I would find out later Garver does a lot of things that don’t cooperate with the filming of a “reality” show. (I shouldn’t put reality in quotes because I really got a tattoo and I really paid a real lot for it. Just like a real tattoo shop.)

I can only describe my actual tattoo experience as akin to sitting in the back of a classroom at school with the stoner kids; like an angry teacher, the producer forever harping at us to stop laughing and be quiet so they can do story beats for the other clients in the shop. Story beats, by the way, are the part of the show were the artist asks the client a list of premeditated questions about their life but tack on phrases like, “So, I’m interest in” or “So, I’m doing this survey.” Off camera I got real questions from Garver like, “Why are you doing the show?” That’s much easier to answer. I wanted to push veganism into the mainstream. I wanted a national audience to see a normal healthy vegan and dispel some of the myth. Mostly I just want people to hear the word vegan. Garver seemed to think most people knew what being vegan means. I even like to think that myself but any vegan who’s ever asked for no dairy at a restaurant and gotten their dinner unwittingly slathered in butter knows that isn’t true. Just for a wide audience to hear the word vegan is huge. Two of my uncles, for example, live in the corn fields of Wisconsin and do their hunting buddies know what a vegan is? Heck no, but they sure as shit watch Miami Ink.

To Garver’s defense, he is more in tune with animal rights than most, sharing that he quit eating pork after seeing an undercover video from a pig farm. Shop owner and face of the show, Ami James made a brief appearance and shared with me that he’s the new face of PETA’s Ink Not Mink campaign, he too shuns pork but I suspect that has more to do with being Jewish. Although another artist in the shop professes that the dude loves animals. He said that while on a trip to New York, Ami found a live bucket of frogs at a store in Chinatown that he attempted purchase of in hopes of setting them free in Central Park until the butcher told him the frogs would have to be slaughtered before they could leave the store. So when you see that Ink Not Mink ad, know that it’s legit.

The tattoo I received pretty well screams animal lover, a sort of art nouvoue style woman coddling farm animals that completely by accident looks a little Virgin of Guadalupe-ish. I say my good-byes, grab Sara and we make our exit. We film this twice because on the first round I forget Sara. I am ecstatic with the outcome but the producers aren’t finished with me yet. For the television part of this experience we do two formal interviews, one before getting the tattoo saying what this tattoo means to me, why I need this tattoo and so on and so forth. The interview after the tattoo is a bit scarier, mostly because by this time the producer doing the interview is exhausted from her 14 hour work day and just wants you to say something quotable whether it’s completely true or not. This gets a bit tedious especially when she brings out questions like, “Where do you get your protein?” For this I graciously explained why that’s a stupid question. Thankfully for the magic of editing I know it doesn’t matter what my answers to these questions are. They’ll find a way to make me look TV interesting. I think they were going for a traumatized as a child angle with me. For the record, I wasn’t. I walked away from Miami Ink in true reality show fashion, feeling slightly dirty and used. This is not a complaint. I traded the rights to my story for the listening ears of a few millions viewers. If this is what activism feels like, I might start picketing.

This episode of Miami Ink airs in January on TLC. Check it out. Tell your friends.