Kimberley’s Ashlee Taylor is seeking the support of the community to vote her onto the cover of Inked Magazine and win a prize of $25,000.
Taylor’s husband told her about the competition a couple of weeks ago, but at first she was hesitant to enter. Then, it popped up again last Friday and there was only two and a half days left in the first bracket of the competition and she decided to go for it.
“I was just feeling spontaneous and thought I’m just going to toss it in there, I have a lot of ink,” Taylor said. “Within an hour I went from 24th to 14th and then I bumped right up within another hour and a half to fifth and it was like okay I’m going to pursue this and start pushing for some votes.”
She added this is the first time she’s ever done any modelling or a contest of this sort, and she was and is still nervous about entering.
“I’m still nervous,” she said. “It’s definitely out there now and I actually got brave enough to put it on my Facebook yesterday and put it out there to all my family.”
Now that she’s decided to go for it and throw her hat in the ring, Taylor’s found that her friends and family have come out in full force to support her.
“I’m blown away that all these people are voting and encouraging us,” she said. “Even my grandma’s standing behind me.”
Taylor said she loves tattoos and got her first one at the age of 18.
“My grandpa had had a stroke and I had visited him and things were kind of taking a turn for the worst, and so I came back and my husband now, boyfriend at the time, gave me the money to go get the tattoo,” she explained.
“My grandpa used to call me Buttons, so I went and got just a little tattoo on the back of my neck that says Buttons with a couple little buttons on it and went back to the hospital right away to show him, because I wanted him to know that I would have him with me forever.”
She said that from there, it became a sort of tradition for her and every one of her tattoos has a story to it.
“I always put lots of thought into it,” Taylor said. “I don’t have one that’s just spontaneous, ‘let’s go get it,’ because I don’t want to regret it, it’s here forever.”
She currently has two full sleeves worth of tattoos, two on her calves, one on her food, one on her back and the one on her neck.
Taylor said she’s looked at Inked Magazine for ideas and inspiration for tattoo style and placement. She has a lot of flowers, with many of them being birth month flowers, for example she has the birth month flower of her uncle who passed away.
If she wins the grand prize of $25,000, Taylor said she would use some of the money to get more tattoos, particularly to add more to her right sleeve, but for the most part, she’d like to invest the money to grow it for her daughters’ education.
As of the time of writing on Friday, Jan. 29, Taylor is currently sitting at third in her group. Friday is the first day that people are voting to narrow the group down to the top ten and it ends on Feb. 4.
You can vote once a day, or you can pay to get more votes, with that money being donated to a music charity. To vote, follow this link: https://cover.inkedmag.com/2021/ashlee-7
She just hopes that people will “vote for your small-town girl!”
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