Kauri told Schinn that her father had passed away and that she had become estranged from her mother. Another tattoo artist recalls that Kauri's mother visited one of her early studios but "didn't seem too impressed" by her chosen career. (Members of the Greene family did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
Another longtime acquaintance says that Kauri had planned to become an air-traffic controller; she abandoned her studies after walking into the Enchanted Dragon, a well-known Tucson tattoo studio, and becoming fascinated with the possibilities of the art form. She had pieces done by the Dragon's Keely Tackett, a trailblazer among female tattoo artists, and persuaded Tackett to take her on as an apprentice. The two worked together for a year, and then Kauri went to work at related studios for another three years.
Tara Schinn, who had several tattoo sessions with Kauri, says her friend "did not want to die like this."
Kim Kosnar, who had "girl talks" with Kauri weeks before her death, says her friend gave no hint of being suicidal.
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Now living in Costa Rica, Tackett remembers the Kauri of the early 1990s as sweet, sincere and dedicated to her craft. "I can tell you she was a great student who worked diligently toward the understanding of how to tattoo," she says. "Kauri always wanted to belong and feel her purpose on this planet. She was always searching for something to complete her — yet she was too nice to those who did not deserve it and took advantage of her kindness."
Tackett was a member of the wedding party when Kauri married a man in Tucson. The union ended badly — Tackett says the groom had legal and drug problems — and left Kauri devastated. Despite her fiercely independent spirit, Kauri regarded finding the right man, her soulmate, a matter of utmost importance. A letter she drafted to another early love stresses this:
"I know my belief system is odd, if not downright in left field," she wrote to him. "I must admit when I'm with someone I do like to spend a lot of time with that person. It means extravagant amounts to me to just hang out with you!!!...I love you and feel as if I've been with you for a much more extensive time frame than just this time. You used to tell me like sentiments, that you felt that I was a soulmate and you would have caught up with me now or whenever possible no matter what. This struck me deeply, made me feel on top of the world to think we were just a matter of time."
She was disappointed in her personal quest time and again, even as her professional life was taking off. She proved to be an artist of exceptional talent and originality. Her website boasted that she was "capable of doing any kind of custom art, from Giger-esque scenes of horror and doom to full-color portraits," but that doesn't begin to describe the startling nature of her work. Much of her art is conceptual, building on geometric forms or fractals. She designed epic cosmic scenes involving planets, luminous gases and entire solar systems. Yet she could also do delicate filigree, crystalline structures, freehand fantasies and hyperreal vegetation, usually shunning the thick black lines that frame many conventional tattoos.
"She didn't have a specific artist that she followed," says Josh Hibbard of Manakin Tattoo in Pismo Beach, California, who worked with Kauri four years ago. "She had her own way of doing things, to the point where it almost made me uneasy. Certain lines that I thought should connect, she didn't connect. But when the piece was finally done, it was awesome. She'd take people's ideas of what they wanted done and make them her own."
She insisted on an immaculate workspace, the best tools and the highest-quality inks, so that her work had staying power; her clients emerged so brightly hued that people wondered if their tattoos were real or some kind of body paint. And she had a horror of the kind of quick flash work, using standard designs, that she felt was turning too many artists into "copy machines with tattoo guns."
"One of her catchphrases was that she was not running a McDonald's," says Reed. "She was not a flash artist. She was not going to sit in a shop and do butterflies. Everything she did was unique to her and to the client, right down to what colors and tones to use."
Kauri spent several years on what she called her "tour," helping to launch custom tattoo shops around the country and lobbying state licensing boards for higher standards of operation. She went from Arizona to Pennsylvania to Buffalo, New York. In 2001, she went to Joplin, Missouri, to work in a shop with Jim Peters, an established artist who had met her during her tutelage under Tackett. By now she had her own distinctive style and a new husband, whom she introduced to Peters as Patrick Williams. She called herself Kauri Williams.
Peters remembers Kauri's companion as a quiet, almost passive fellow, the kind of guy who might collect Star Wars action figures and read a lot of sci-fi. The two had apparently met in New York somewhere; Peters never got the whole story. Pat sat in the corner of the shop, saying little, while Kauri talked a blue streak about an idea she had for a reversible, painless microabrasion tattoo process and some book about physics she was writing.
