Jesse

From a prison cell, an artist draws a path to purpose

You can’t get Nikes in prison. 

That’s how Jesse Jones explains the swoosh on his left foot. He tattooed it there himself in 2022 while incarcerated for robbery and battery. He was 27, angry and bored. He wanted something to do and something to feel. 

So with a machine he made himself using plastic wrap, a pen tube and the motor from a beard trimmer, he pulsed a logo into his skin, right where it would be if he’d been able to get his hands on some sneakers. He knew foot tattoos were especially painful, and that was partly the point, too.

Today, Jesse is still tattooing, but under vastly different circumstances. Now free, he works full time at Ink Slaves, a respected, highly professional shop in downtown Boise. He started as an apprentice in 2024 while still an inmate at the nearby Idaho State Correctional Center. Trying desperately to remake his life, he managed to get into a community reentry program, and then persuaded the program’s manager to let him pursue tattooing, something that had never been done before. 

Photo by Alec Ingram, courtesy of Jesse Jones

“It wasn’t until I was sitting in the hole that I realized I had to change,” Jesse says. He’s at Ink Slaves, just after finishing with a client. He’s in ink-spattered khakis and a Dodgers hat. 

“If everyone around you is saying you’re a piece of shit and that you did things you shouldn’t have, you start to realize they’re right. It was a humble pill I had to swallow, or else I never would have gotten here.” 

Photo by Alec Ingram, courtesy of Jesse Jones

Now 30, Jesse grew up in Reseda, California. He was 16 when his mother finally had enough of his behavior and sent him to Coeur d’Alene to live with his 21-year-old sister. Jesse found his niche in drugs and partying. When his sister moved in with a new boyfriend, a friend’s sofa is all that kept Jesse from becoming homeless. He failed classes, got into carpentry work and meth, signed up for the Army National Guard, and then got kicked out for drugs. 

His arrest came in February 2021. Angry over a cell phone that he considered his, he stormed to his ex-girlfriend’s house to get it back. Her roommate pulled a gun and she and Jesse struggled before he grabbed the phone and left. No one was seriously hurt, but Jesse regrets everything else about that day, most of all that his infant son, Zander, was in the house at the time.  

Jesse says his imprisonment marked the first time he’d faced real consequences for years of misdeeds. 

“When the judge sentences you to time, it’s not always a bad thing. It’s giving you time to be away from the world and reflect,” he says. “Going to prison gave me an opportunity to grow and become a man that I never thought I could be.” 

Jesse had always liked to draw, and he was good at it. In prison it became a way to make small amounts of money for the commissary. Soon he was tattooing; the swoosh on his own foot was the first he did while in prison. He started taking drawing more seriously and attempting realism.

He was about halfway through his four-year sentence when he told himself he would somehow become a professional tattoo artist. “I feel like I manifested it. I spoke it into existence.”

Because his crime was violent, Jesse needed an exception based on good behavior to get into the Treasure Valley Community Reentry Center. His first job through the program was in outbound sales. He felt like he was scamming people and had just quit when he happened to see the reentry center’s manager. Jesse had asked her before about tattooing, but this time she budged, saying she’d consider it if he put a real proposal together. 

On authorized trips, he visited local tattoo shops to ask about apprenticeships. The first two said no. The third was Ink Slaves. 

Photo courtesy of Jesse Jones

For almost a year before Jesse’s release in November 2024, he worked seven days a week, Monday through Friday doing carpentry and weekends at Ink Slaves. As part of his apprenticeship, he did 50 tattoos for free on clients who he found by putting up flyers at his construction job. The first one he did was a flock of crows. 

He says tattooing has given him much more than he imagined. He is sober, and he is especially proud that he forged a path for other inmates to pursue tattooing through the reentry center – at least two so far.

He has found the stability to seek reunification with his son, now 4, and he has found purpose. While art drew him to tattoos, helping clients to heal after pain or trauma feels like his true calling, he says. He has had deeply meaningful experiences tattooing people after they’ve lost loved ones, survived sexual assault, battled depression and more. 

“It’s a kind of therapy,” he says. “It’s an aspect I didn’t expect. It’s so much bigger than I thought. I focus very much on being compassionate with people.”

His old life feels a million miles away now.  

He turns up his palm and runs a finger over a tattoo he did on his wrist when he was 19: F.T.W. Fuck the world. 

“I didn’t used to care about my own life or anyone else’s,” he says. 

He smiles and laughs a little. 

“Now this stands for free the whales.”