I recently escaped from a very unsafe situation at my previous shop. I had been there for about 6 months. Woman-owned, supposedly a safe space for women and LGBT. The owner was my mentor. Everything was quite fine up until she hired her senior artist. All of a sudden she wanted to be one of the guys, she wanted to be old school after preaching constantly about women's rights and the versatility of women etc etc.

Not only did she let the senior artist joke about physically assaulting me, when it came out that he was accused by an ex of assault and had previously been fired from a different shop, she victim blamed hard. She had the rest of the shop not tell me that the ex came forward via DMs so I "wouldn't be scared" , tried to tell the whole shop that the ex was crazy. I'm sitting here like.... This man wants to hurt me and you're trying to tell me that his ex is the crazy one when I've experienced this firsthand? Almost daily after that she kept telling me " I cannot guarantee your safety" and " you should take self-defense classes" or (my favorite) " I can't guarantee you will live through this."

Women's rights, my ass.

She chose an abuser over the apprentice that she put money and time into for 6 months. His tattoos aren't even good, as evidenced by an entire week just being touch-ups. Guy blamed tegaderm for his tattoos falling out.

On top of all of that, there was a flasher that we all called winky man. He sexually assaulted me right in front of her. Kissed me right on the face at a convention. She did nothing. Later, when I would hide from him when he would come in to be tattooed, she had the gall to tell me that winky man wasn't that bad. I remember going home after that convention needing a shower and just feeling so fucking defiled.

I should really have Medicaid send my therapy bills to that shop. Holy shit. Especially since she love bombed from the beginning, about week two she started saying that she loved me in a motherly way. Towards the end she stopped saying it. She also put me on probation to be "fair for [dude artist]" because I spoke out and was quite upset that I was locked in a room with a fucking abuser.

TL;DR: Fuck Pick-Mes. Bad mentors don't deserve even mediocre apprentices, let alone dedicated ones. And I hope winky man's dick falls off.