Briar Neville and Dan Andersen
Briar Neville, 41, and Dan Andersen, 44, own Sacred Tattoo and Sacred Laser, where Dan is a tattoo artist and Briar is a tattoo-removal technician. They live in Auckland with their sons Juno, 4, and Zeke, 2. Sacred Laser has a second branch in Christchurch.
BDan and I met in the late 90s and I got tattooed by him in 1998 – it was my second tattoo, two fairies on my arm. I still love it very dearly even though they are old and faded. We didn’t get together back then. That wasn’t until 2013, when I went to talk to him about getting another tattoo. I felt all these things that took me by surprise because I’d never looked at him like that before.
We got married when I was seven months pregnant with Juno. It seems like such an old-fashioned thing to do, to have a child in wedlock, but I wanted to make a lifelong commitment to Dan and the family we were about to have.
I was engaged before I met Dan and we had tried for a long time to conceive a child. I have a disease called adenomyosis which means I couldn’t conceive naturally. When I got together with Dan I was a little bit older – 35 – so I knew I needed to not mess around with my fertility any more.
The IVF part was doable, but they had to put me into menopause for three months before they put the embryo back in because they had to arrest the disease inside my womb. All my hormones just cut off – bang! Shut down. I went a little bit loopy in the end.
You’re always going to be thrown obstacles, but it’s how you tackle them as a team that matters. And we did come together – we always do. The communication we have with each other is so important.
And despite what I’d been told, Zeke, our youngest son, was conceived naturally, so we have two miracle babies.
Dan’s an amazing father; born to be a dad, and born to make dad jokes. He’s a real fixer, too – not like a Ray Donovan kind of fixer, but I think a lot of people he tattoos would tell you the same thing: you come in for a tattoo session and you walk out with your life completely sorted out.
As well as the day-to-day stuff, I do gang and prison tattoo removal and I feel like those are the people most deserving of tattoo removal. For me, one of the most fulfilling parts of my job is helping someone begin a new path in life, take on a new direction. Removing those physical barriers is obviously key to a new beginning. Those are the people I get true job satisfaction out of helping.
DI tattooed Briar when she was 18. That’s when we first got talking. Years and years and years later, we got together. We were acquaintances all the way through, and when I moved back to New Zealand she got in touch about another tattoo. We had a drink and a catch up to talk about it. That sort of turned into a date and it was all go from there. We didn’t really spend any time apart from that moment.
A lot of it is timing. We just had different lives for so long. I was married before and moved back from Australia when that marriage fell over. Briar went through her own stuff and then it was kind of our time. During that time without each other, we both refined what we really wanted from life. So by the time we did find each other and had the space in our lives for each other, we were on the same page.
I knew it was getting serious maybe about a week in. It got to the point that I was shaking with energy sometimes. You’ve got to be kind of chill when you’re tattooing, but I was finding it difficult to work; I was so excited, I was actually vibrating.
I think it happened quickly because we knew each other pretty well. I’d tattooed her a bunch of times and when you’re tattooing someone you know, you tend to open up because you are there for three hours. There were no secrets. We were open books from before we even got together.
Briar has this huge heart and she’s so giving to everyone around her. I think I’m probably a bit more practical and can get a bit more selfish or focused on what needs to be done, but she is so caring and such an amazing mother. And to see it is quite beautiful.
She was unbelievable during IVF. It was tough, even writing things down for the fertility specialists, like how long we’d been trying to get pregnant – I wrote down 24 months, and Briar had to write down something like 90-something. She had been disappointed for that long.
We love spending time together. I miss my family when they are not around. So working together is awesome. When we’re at work, we tease each other relentlessly, and it’s just so much fun.