Lza Steyaert:
Work in Progress

PHOTOGRAPHY | PETTER HEGRE WORDS | CLIFFORD THURLOW

On Lza's left arm, three tattooed red stars are raised above the surface of her skin by a platform of silicone; her right arm is an entwined garden of climbing roses humming with giant bumble bees; her breasts are surgically perfect with pink nipples adorned with matching stars, their presence peeking over the rim of a red and white checked bra.

Lza Steyaert is clearly used to such attentions. She is, as she explains, a work of art in progress, and puts me at my ease by lighting a Camel and yelling affectionately at her dog. The creature is seven months old 'with a missing teat and a big pussy,' which she displays with a gasp of mock incredulity. The animal is in a curious way a mirror to Lza: Pepette is vivacious, curious and unconventionally beautiful, an extension of Lza's personality. All dogs, they say, resemble their owners.

I am in Petter Hegre's studio in Paris to interview Lza, but she seems more comfortable talking about Pepette. Her features grow animated as she explains how she has never liked dogs. She hates dogs. But she is having a liaison amoureuse with pugs. 'Pepette is my baby,' she adds, and the dog obediently unfurls an extra-ordinarily long tongue to lick her face. 'Naughty baby. Non, Non, Non,' she says, which clearly means Oui, Oui, Oui. Lza's English is more than competent and enhanced if anything by her melodious enunciation and occasional profanity. 'Everyone is from everywhere, but to be a model, you have to speak English.'

Lza Steyaert was born in Barcelona where her conventional parents were teachers at the French Institute. Her mother remarried, but she is the only child of her father. 'He is wonderful. I adore him. Very elegant, very conservative,' she says with a sigh. 'He was so angry when I started with my tattoos. I am his little girl, his child. He wanted me to be a doctor, of course, but I had my first tattoo at fourteen and I was hooked.'

She runs her hand over the rose garden on her arm. Lza started modelling at sixteen and has worked often with Jean-Paul Gaultier, intermittently with Karl Lagerfeld, and has graced the runways at the top shows and the pages of the world's most prestigious magazines. She believes, as Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, that a woman is not born but made, and considers herself lucky not to be a clone out of central casting. When art directors ask for a 'pretty blonde' or a 'sultry brunette,' two thousand girls rush off with their portfolios.

She shrugs, as if at the absurdity of all things, and nurses the Vivienne Westward skull-and-crossbones at her throat. 'It's all so bitchy competing with each other,' she says. 'I'm not a virgin canvas. I am the tattoo lady. The designers either ask for me, or they don't ask for me.'

Every girl has a secret. That's what makes their image in photographs so alluring. But Lza Steyaert is something of a contradiction. She acts street-smart, vaguely hostile, but the vulnerability in her eyes gives the impression that there is a wound festering still below the surface of her tattoos. She is aware of her charisma, but while her big personality fills the room, it is her secret self that makes her so seductive.

The message in her tattoos is not aggression, she says, it is art. 'I am a sculpture that is permanently changing,' she says reflectively. 'I want to create something original. My body is a garden.' She touches the three raised stars on her arm. 'Stars,' she whispers, 'are my leitmotif.'

I can't help asking the obvious question: isn't all this tattoo work painful? Lza shrugs once again, as if she would like us to believe that it doesn't hurt at all.

'Non, non, non,' she says. Then her dark eyes cloud and she squeals as if remem-bering the sheer agony. 'I cry buckets of tears every time it's done. Every time. But when it's over, it makes me so happy.'

In April, Lza started a new venture disseminating her tattoo philosophy with two other girls at the Korosif Studio in Paris. The centre provides distinctive body art in tattooing, piercing and scarification – the act of scarring the body in esoteric designs. Too many people, she says, have tattoos as a fashion accessory, not an expression of their individuality. 'Everything is a copy of everything else. But that's not why people are running to our studio. They come to us to create something that reveals who they are.'

The three girls have created a photo studio, an art gallery and are working on their own fashion line. This is Paris and this is Lza Steyaert. Even if she would like to step off the fashion carousel, the whirlwind sucks her back on again. She has a deep-seated need to be on show, modelling clothes, or modelling her nudity. She likes being naked but, paradoxically, never feels naked. 'My tattoos are my underwear.'

Lza confesses that she had been badly scarred in an accident as a child and never imagined that she would ever let anyone see her unclothed body. When she saw an article in National Geographic about ritual scarring in Africa, she realised that scars could be beautiful. She had intended to go to Africa to have her scars enhanced, and eventually settled for a studio in the South of France. 'It was so painful, and the pain lasted for two months.' But Lza is clearly cured of her nudity phobia and has turned it into an asset.

She has twenty hours more work to complete her rose garden, which will take a year or so, and then plans one last tattoo on her back. She is still working on the design. 'I keep making changes, but I know at the very centre will be a heart and in big words: My Heart Belongs to Daddy.'

We are getting into deeper, less secure areas of Lza's persona but she is saved by the dog. Pepette has left a couple of tidy balls of poo on the studio floor and she screams for added drama as she rushes around with tissues cleaning up the mess. The pug slinks away, but then Lza scoops it up into her arms for a wet kiss. She pulls the baseball cap over her pixie face, looks at me with her big eyes, and you can't help getting the feeling that only when the last tattoo is complete will Lza truly extinguish that childhood trauma and discover the work of art she already is.