Remembering Becca Luna

Becca Luna was a talented aspiring tattoo artist and model based in New York. She was a contestant in this year’s Inked Cover Girl Contest, however, she passed away on January 21st, 2021. Luna was working toward becoming a professional tattoo artist and had been collecting tattoos of her own over the years. She was also passionate about tattoo modeling and had booked a talent manager with the hopes of getting into acting. In honor of Becca Luna, we asked her mother and best friend to say a few words.

“Becca struggled with mental health issues since adolescence, sometimes cutting herself to relieve the emotional pain,” Sarah Leibowits, Becca’s mother, explained. “Once she was in therapy, she decided she really wanted to cover up those scars with a tattoo. In N.Y., one has to be 18 to get a tattoo so on her 16th birthday, I took her to Connecticut where it’s legal to get tattooed with a parent’s consent. She chose a compass because she was thinking about looking for direction in her life. From that moment on, she was hooked. For her 17th birthday we returned to Connecticut for another tattoo. This time she got a Victorian hand mirror with a skull in the reflection.”

Luna’s passion for getting tattoos flourished into a desire to become a tattoo artist herself. “She’s always been an incredible artist since she was a child,” Leibowits says. “She gave herself and friends several ‘stick and pokes.’ As a senior in high school, she did a short internship at Devil’s Ink Tattoo in East Harlem, N.Y., where she learned how to use a tattoo machine by practicing on oranges and synthetic skins. When she finally turned 18, she was excited to go by herself to get an official NYC tattoo. She also did her first official tattoo on her best friend, Michael—it was a Popsicle.” 

“She had many tattoos, more than I even knew about,” Leibowits continues. “She got them in different places to remind her of that time in her life. She wanted to be covered in tattoos because she loved being an artist’s canvas and then becoming the art. Her final tattoo was done by Douglas Grady in NYC. It was the dragon on her rib cage. After her death, her sister and I contacted Douglas and asked him to give us matching tattoos in her memory. She often wore a pendant of the tree of life so we decided this image was perfect to memorialize our darling Becca. She died on 1/21/21, an anagram, perfect for her.”

“Her kindness was unmatched. I’ve never heard her raise her voice to anyone and her spirit was pure, despite the rock ‘n’ roll persona,” Anja Avsharian, Becca’s best friend, says. “She stayed true to herself and her individuality. She didn’t care even a little bit what people thought of her and made that known with her tattoos and in everything she did. Across her knuckles read ‘Wild Card’ and I truly cannot think of a more befitting way to describe her.”

“She had the goofiest sense of humor, she could find anything to laugh about—even when things got tough,” Avsharian says. “She would drop everything for her friends when something was wrong. It didn’t matter what she had going on, if I needed her she was there. Period.

“She had two cats and was extremely passionate about animals,” Avsharian continues. “She couldn’t watch those PETA commercials, she was too sensitive. She definitely liked animals better than people. She attended about a million BLM protests and was a big activist. She worried often about the environment and was a big defender of nature.”

“She had just booked a talent manager for modeling and acting,” Avsharian adds. “She was a budding tattoo artist, had just bought all of her equipment. She LOVED the arts and specifically was a huge fan of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ and anime. We always joked that she was too bougie for her own good. She loved the finer things, though she may not have always been able to afford them. Her smile was contagious and her laugh infectious.”