Lauren Winzer: tattoos, Instagram and my mate Miley

Lauren Winzer is mates with Miley Cyrus and has 213,000 Instagram followers. But she’s not a typical social media starlet.

TWAM 2 April 2016

Sydney 2015

People make assumptions about Lauren Winzer because she’s a striking woman who’s covered in tattoos, and because she’s mates with Miley Cyrus, drives a hot-pink jeep, owns three fluffy, yappy little dogs and has 213,000 followers on Instagram.

Winzer’s not your typical social media starlet, though: she grew up on the edge of the Royal National Park south of Sydney — a childhood spent tearing around on bikes, swimming in dams and jumping off waterfalls in the bush. She didn’t even own a mobile phone until high school.

Winzer was always arty, and after moving to the big smoke at 21 she married tattooist Heath Nock, who redirected her flair with pencil and paper towards nature’s own canvas. In just four years her work as a tattooist — she specialises in girly, cartoonish designs — has garnered an army of fans, including Cyrus, whom she inked and now hangs out with. (On one trip to LA, Winzer even let Cyrus tattoo her. Just savour that thought for a moment: the delicious recklessness of handing the famously bonkers pop star a tattoo gun and saying, Go for your life. Cyrus did her an LSD tab with a smiley face.)

Instagram is a powerful marketing tool for Winzer, who posts photos of her work daily, and also a platform for a few haters whose rants “at times feel like bullying”, she says. Still, that’s part of the deal, shrugs the 27-year-old, who’s holding a tattoo gun in this shot from HighScrollers, a series on social media big-hitters, which appears in the upcoming Head On Photo Festival.

Winzer learnt her craft by tattooing slabs of pork belly; then her husband, out of loving, marital trust, rolled up his own trouser leg for her debut inking on human flesh. He’s from a long line of hard-working showpeople, a tough-looking bloke covered in big, manly tatts. But he remains inordinately proud of that first work by his wife. What did she do? “It’s a My Little Pony on a skateboard,” she laughs.