WHAT IS A SOUL TATTOO®?

Soul Tattoos are a multidimensional form of healing using the alchemy of ceremonial tattooing.

These sacred marking ceremonies are initiations into your unique soul song, medicine, and creative magic. These one-of-a-kind markings hand woven into skin and soul by Ashley are channeled to activate, liberate, and anchor more of your soul’s true essence into your body and life.

Soul Tattoo® ceremonies are transformational thresholds from a former life into the new, using a collection of ancient modalities, including ceremonial hand-poked tattooing, to activate your own creative alchemy, feminine power, and magic.
 
Soul Tattoos bring tattooing back to its magical, ancient, universal origins—thousands and thousands of years before the tattoo machine and the modern tattoo industry—when tattoos were light activations, spiritual amulets, spells, protection, feminine temple rituals, priestess initiations, death work, and stories of the soul’s evolutionary journey.
 
Soul Tattoos are a catalyst for deep transformation

Soul Tattoos

are sacred talismans that carry potent vibrational medicine that can create transformational shifts for the receiver.

It is through the ceremonial, deeply shamanic process of intention casting, connection to Spirit, and feminine magic that we can harness the true nature of this ancient, sacred healing art, and use it to heal and leap into deeper alignment with our soul’s true expression. These markings woven by hand act as portals of activation, symbols of empowerment, initiatory experiences, threshold guides, and medicine that goes much, much deeper than the art you see on the surface. In fact, the healing activation of a soul tattoo imprints your soul with a specific evolutionary healing that will be carried with you after you leave your present body form. Though a Soul Tattoo is a highly therapeutic, intentional healing experience of receiving a tattoo that is unique to each person, it is also deep evolutionary work that asks you to rise to alignment with who you truly are.

This form of tattooing is
mysterious.
 
You don’t know what you are receiving and where when you walk into a tattoo ceremony with Ashley. Soul Tattoos ask you to trust the unknown, the infinite mystery, the feminine, in order to let go of control and access more of your own magical feminine nature. This is one of the deepest parts of the process for when you completely surrender to creation, and step into the unknown, creation moves through you and changes your life.
 
As no soul is the same, no Soul Tattoo® design or ceremonial experience is the same. But somehow, when you look at your skin adorned with art you had never seen before, you find yourself at home in the familiarity of its energetic signature, because it carries the light of your soul.
How Does it Work?

Each ceremony is intentionally curated for the unique healing and spoken or unspoken soul desires of the client.

Each Soul Tattoo ceremony typically includes a combination of plant medicine, intention/spell casting and story telling to ease into the experience, followed by an energy restoring, protecting, and grounding meditation, shamanic journey, and/or ritual experience while Ashley reads the aura and energy body to gather medicine and messages from both her own and the client’s soul, guides, cosmic and earth allies. The Soul Tattoo’s design is sometimes created from the images and messages that were received during the meditation, though often the tattoo comes through for Ashley in dreams, ceremony, or meditation before the session and the reading clarifies and expands on the medicine that is already coming through.

Soul Tattoo designs

carry the energetic signatures of spoken and unspoken languages, plant medicine, sacred symbolism, animal allies, cosmic symbols of light, ancient coding, or any other symbolic medicine that is channeled to support and guide the client for their highest evolution.

Each dot, line, mark, and symbol contain intentional alchemy to draw out the client’s truest soul expression and weave their intentions into form, activating deep healing and transformation. Though the tattoo placement is often channeled with the tattoo to align with where energy s needed to be moved, activated, or released in the body, Ashley and her client will discuss the energy body, physical body, organs, shamanic expressions of physical ailments, and meridians to align the design to the placement on the body that can best support the client’s personal healing and intentions.

Light language and energy work is woven into the tattooing to deeply relax and open the client, while also activating energetic shifts, clearings, and creating space within for the medicine of the Soul Tattoo to integrate. During this process, many clients fall into a deep meditative state while they receive, while others have big releases, awareness shifts, and even the healing from trauma, past lives, and ancestral patterns. However the medicine expresses, Ashley is a deep anchor and guide through the journey. Each ceremony is sealed with sound clearing, hands on energy work and light weaving, smoke blessing or other elemental blessing, and/or prayer, depending on the client. At the end of the ceremony, Ashley will prescribe healing rituals, integration tools, and/or homework to support the client further on their journey as they walk with their new soul marking.

Soul Tattoos serve as catalysts for one’s transformation, an initiation into an expanded expression of Self, guiding each person to move further in alignment with their truth, creative power, voice, magic, purpose, and heart’s ancient wisdom.
 
By bringing a high vibrational, soul-led, divinely channeled art piece with powerful intentions for transformation and liberation onto skin, we are opening a portal for healing through the piercing of the skin, and thus the piercing of the veil. Anything of lower resonance held within the body and energy body will begin to release to align with the frequency of the Soul Tattoo. These may be outdated beliefs, familiar patterns, energetic blocks, trauma, stagnant emotions, past life stories, ancestral stories, or any other creative limitations. For this reason, this work is death work. Death/Grief are a part of any evolutionary process and nothing to be feared, for the deeper we let go, the more life available to us on the other side.
 
Soul Tattoos can help strengthen one’s intuitive gifts, activate one into their gifts and medicine, dissolve creative blocks, inspire creativity and authentic expression, call out one’s truth and vision, reclaim one’s feminine power, voice, and soul’s wishes, and overall balance the energy body.
Testimonials

Ashley’s Story

As a young woman who began receiving tattoos at just 16, I struggled to find a sense of trust, intentionality, and sacredness in the overtly masculine tattoo space. With my psychic and energetic sensitivities and highly attuned and sensitive nervous system, I did not resonate with the modern act of receiving a tattoo from a young age, but deep down my soul was deeply drawn to use art on skin as a form of remembrance, magic, and transformation. A desire to create sacredness in the tattoo experience arose, to carve out a safe space for sensitive, mystical beings like me to return home to this intentional and intuitive art form that has always belonged to the feminine (the mystics, priestesses, seers, and midwives of death/life). At 23, I began combining my design and illustration background, connection to the elemental and spirit worlds, and psychic/energetic gifts and fed them into tattoo art, becoming a licensed tattoo artist in NYC. One evening under a Taurus full moon a couple of years after I first picked up a tattoo needle, the name “Soul Tattoo” was whispered in my ear by spirit, and deep remembrance and integration of its teachings, medicine, and coded magic followed. 

I spent the following years traveling around the world, from New York City to New Zealand activating this work and offering Soul Tattoos to provide deep soul initiation and essence activation to mystical, intuitive, creative, sensitive beings seeking transformation and reclamation of their truth and magic. My practice quickly gained worldwide recognition and a multi-year waitlist before I took a step back to teach and author my books. After a necessary break, my practice and medicine only deepened and now I serve 1:1 clients in Soul Tattoo ceremony, group tattoo ceremonies working with the power of collective prayer, and teach this Sacred Tattooing work both online and in person.
 
As of Spring, 2023, I offer my Soul Tattoo work primarily in Southern California (L.A), but I travel when the lands call me to share this work elsewhere. If you have a healing space and would like to host me for a Soul Tattoo residency, please reach out to scheduling@ashleyriver.co. To stay up to date with residency announcements, sign up for my newsletter. 
Disclaimer:
 
Within Ashley’s tattooing practice she honors the traditional lineages and custodians of tattooing and its sacred and cosmic origins. She pays her respects to all ancient tattooing practices, past, present, and future, for anchoring down this modality as a tool for collective healing and empowerment. Ashley is in no way using this work to culturally appropriate any of their traditional practices.
 
Tattooing is an ancient, powerful healing art form woven through all cultures of humanity since we came to this planet. The way Ashley practices this art form is connected to her own blood lineages (primarily of Celtic ancestry) as well her soul lineages, in dedication to the Earth, the stars, and the weavers of creation. If you are curious to learn more about the origins of tattooing as an ancient healing modality, please check out the School of the Sacred Arts, a school Ashley co-founded, which goes deeper into the history of tattooing as a feminine art form and the many lineages that have birthed this work into form across space and many timelines.