About

Terisa Green is a writer who lives with her fabulous husband in Los Angeles, where they currently cater to the whims of Babe, the feral cat.  She has written The Tattoo Encyclopedia: A Guide to Choosing Your Tattoo, Ink: The Not-Just-Skin Deep Guide to Getting a Tattoo, and articles for Playboy.com, Cosmopolitan, and The New York Times, amongst others.  She received her B.S. in physics and Ph.D. in archaeology from UCLA, and was once a lecturer there too.  She is equally at home speaking at NASA briefings, competing at Toastmasters’ contests, or showing elementary school children how to make an arrowhead, although the kids are the toughest crowd.

Best Job:  Writer.

Worst Job:  Acid stripper.  Imagine standing next to a small pool of boiling hydrochloric acid, dipping a big glass plate coated with metal in it, and watching the metal bubble away.  Then imagine repeating that, fifty times a day, outside, in the summer, wearing a lot of rubber.

Most Surreal Experience:  Touching solid gold lavatory fixtures in the private plane of a Saudi prince, at four in the morning, while it was parked in the Mojave Desert.

Second Most Surreal Experience:  Riding in the cargo section of a C-130 and not vomiting, when everybody else was.

Pastimes:  Writing, writing, and then some more writing.

Favorite Scotch:  Macallan 25.  Not that she owns any.

Most Fun Research:  Audited an internship at famed tattoo studio Sunset Strip Tattoo in Hollywood.  Mixed ink, loaded an autoclave, soldered needles, greeted customers–but never tattooed anybody, thank the gods.

Best Training for Writing:  Climbed the tallest pyramid in the western hemisphere–Temple IV at Tikal–high above the Peten jungle.  It wasn’t the climb.  It was worrying about falling, then doing it anyway.