Jesse Iacovelli sits with his dog, Gimli, at Farewell Bend Park in central Oregon. Jesse, his wife, and their children now live in Star, where Jesse works as a faith-based tattoo artist. (Photo by Taylor Iacovelli)
By Gaye Bunderson
Throw away all the tattoo stereotypes that course through your brain, and instead, hear about Jesse Iacovelli, a man who says of himself: “I am covered head to toe.” His body may be a version of a fully tattooed man, but his spirit is 100% connected to Christ.
By his own admission, he was not raised Christian as he was growing up, many of those years in Phoenix and Philadelphia. “I came from no religious background,” he said. But he became a Christian in 2018, following a spiritual search that included Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions. He describes himself as an inquisitive person who needs an explanation for everything. “If you say the sky is blue, I can see that it’s blue, but I want to know WHY it’s blue,” Iacovelli said.
His ultimate exploration of Christianity started with the same inquisitive I-need-to-know-all-about-it mindset. It also started when he met a girl, Taylor, who is now his wife. Taylor was quick to invite him to explore her Christian faith. A committed church-goer, she asked Jesse, “Can I talk to you after church?” He replied by asking, “Can I go to church with you?”
That day was a pivotal Sunday for the couple – and especially for Jesse. “It was like the pastor was talking to me,” he said. There was an altar call that day and Jesse didn’t hesitate to go forward: “I marched up there!”
He remembers it as a positive experience, but he still had questions – hard ones, such as, “Why do babies die?” and “Why do kids get cancer?”
He met the right pastor that day – a man who did not shy away from difficult questions, but who invited Iacovelli to meet with him regularly, throw all his hard questions at him, and he would use the Bible to supply answers.
Iacovelli was about 25 at the time and is now 33; he believes the pastor who helped provide him with so many answers to his questions is now retired. But back then, when the pastor would provide a Scripture to guide the young man, Iacovelli would write it down, then go and read the full passage. “I literally went and studied it at home,” he said. “He discipled me, and I gave my life to Christ. For everything I asked him, he had a scriptural answer.”
Iacovelli lived much of his life in Pennsylvania, where his father owned a tattoo shop. Subsequently, his son had always been interested in tattoos, and in someday being a tattoo artist himself. But the beginnings of his life were not easy and didn’t set him on any kind of course to become the Christian he is today.
“I came from an abusive, drug-filled, separated household. I lived with my mom, a severe alcoholic, where I was physically and emotionally abused. When I was 10, I was getting so physically abused that I packed a blanket in my school backpack and stopped and got water at a 7-Eleven; then, when school was out, I slept in the playground. But I look at it now as ‘God was watching out for me’.”
A buddy of his alerted his own mom to Jesse’s situation. The woman came to him at the playground after school and said, “I don’t want you staying outside anymore.” She sat down with him and told him, “You are welcome in our home. You can live there, be there, no questions asked, you are welcome there.”
The woman’s name was Diane, and Iacovelli still talks with her to this day. “She saved my life,” he said.
When young Iacovelli’s mom got wind of the arrangement, “She came over and started screaming at Diane: ‘You’re not going to take my kid!’ I said, ‘I’m going to stay here!’ I wouldn’t go home and bear the brunt from my mom.”
He would occasionally stay at his mom’s house … until one time when he was 13. She kicked his bedroom door in, gripped him by the neck, and started screaming at him. He was uncomfortable telling the next part of the story and said, “I don’t want to sound like I abuse women, but this one time, I slapped my mom in the face – only that one time and that changed it.”
Iacovelli told his mother he was going to go live with his dad; he did, and the reason his mom didn’t prevent it was because his father paid her child support, so she said okay and didn’t make a fuss about it. She basically took the child support payments and let Jesse go. He said that even to this day she has chosen a life of drugs over a normal life.
Neither of Iacovelli’s parents have said much about his new life of faith. He continues to be estranged from his mother and said his father is an easygoing man who allows others to make their own choices about what is right for them. His dad did tattooing since 1994, but he is now retired.
Iacovelli is trying hard to be the parent he never had. He and Taylor now have two sons and a daughter. “We’re giving the kids the life I never had as a child. We are working to build a great life and marriage for our kids’ sake.”
Taylor is a registered nurse and Iacovelli works daily at a tattoo shop, as he always planned.
He calls the fact he was able to work for a Christ-centered shop in the Treasure Valley named Atonement Tattoo a “divine appointment.”
He had moved West, starting in Chandler, Ariz., where he worked for Salt & Light Tattoo and had asked the owner, “How do you do this in a setting so demonic?” The tattooers at Salt & Light told him he was free to share his testimony. They were comfortable with their faith, and the owner himself told him, “’I’ll bring you on and you can use my station’. I found out there was a home for believers that were tattooers; they could express their faith through art and not so much the demonic. I won’t put any tattoo on somebody that goes against the Bible.”
He then came to Oregon and Idaho. “Through tattooing, I ran in the same circle of friends [as the owner of a local tattoo shop]; some of my buddies told me to reach out to a guy named Matt. When I called him, he said he had just spent 30 minutes to an hour praying about opening a faith-based tattoo shop called Atonement Tattoo.”
After Iacovelli got the job at Atonement, he was adamant about what he would tattoo on skin and what he wouldn’t. And he was backed up by his new employer. “I quit at a shop I was at when a lady wanted a tattoo of a burning church,” he explained. “I told her, ‘I can’t to that.’ The owner said, ‘Just do the tattoo, then you don’t need to be here’.”
So he quit. “I knew I was going to be a tattooer since I was 4 years old. I left that shop.”
He said he went through a phase when he asked himself, “Do I really want to do this?” He explained that, “Tattoos can be demonic; it’s all about being a free spirit, and things like crystals.”
Now, at Atonement Tattoo, he is once again free to pursue his love of skin art.
Is there really art involved in tattooing? Well, Iacovelli knows all the terms necessary for his works of skill, creativity, imagination, and even beauty. Such as:
When he first started going to church, he admits he made others uncomfortable with his prolific body art. “It’s kinda funny,” he said, “when I first started going to church, I got side eyes [a sidelong glance expressing disapproval or even contempt] and many ‘you shouldn’t be here’ looks.”
But a shift in at least one couple’s focus happened while Iacovelli did tats at Salt & Light. “While I was working at the Salt & Light shop, there was a couple who would look at me, and then look away; they were getting tattoos. Eventually, the man came up to me and said, ‘You go to Scottsdale Bible [Church], don’t you? Can we go outside and talk?’”
Surprisingly, the man wanted to apologize to Iacovelli, telling him, “I had seen you at church, and in my flesh I was judgmental. Then you gave your testimony during a service and it broke my wife and me. We felt in our spirits that we had been judgmental, and that we were wrong.”
They were sincere in their apology to that point that, “They were crying and giving me hugs.” said Iacovelli.
Jesse, Taylor, and their children just moved to the local area about eight months ago; they moved into their home in Star two days before Christmas 2025. Atonement Tattoo is based in Star.
As of early June, the couple was church-hopping in search of a church home, and they were excited about a Calvary Church coming to the community of 20,000 to 25,000 people. They hoped to find a church comfortable with tattoos, or at least willing to learn to be comfortable.
For those who haven’t seen Iacovelli in person, he is easily recognizable when one knows that, by his admission, he has “all sorts of stuff” inked on his body. But before anyone hops on the judgment train, be informed that his tats include the following, in his own words: “My back has historical events of Jesus’ life; my head has Golgotha, and I have a crown of thorns on my head. I also have a sacred heart on the very top of my head.”
His wife is adorned with a small tattoo that says, “Be still,” from a favorite psalm. While his children aren’t old enough for tattoos yet, and they maintain a fully judgment-free outlook on them as kids do, they nonetheless enjoy their dad’s body art in a very typically childlike way. “When they ask, I let them get a marker and color on my tattoos,” their father said.
Jesse Iacovelli can be found on Instagram @Jessetattooer.
