Steady Betty was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. She relocated to Portland in 2006 at the age of 18 to attend the University of Portland School of Nursing because she was told that “Artist” was not an actual career. After a little over a year, she dropped out to become an Emergency Medical Technician. Once certified, she began working graveyard shift at the Hooper Center Sobering Station (aka Multnomah County Drunk Tank), an understandably stressful and draining job for anyone, let alone a person too young to even legally consume alcohol. One day, while she was complaining about her job to a friend, he said “If you could do anything in the world and get paid for it, what would you do?” She replied, “I’d be a tattoo artist. I always wanted to do art for a living.” The friend pointed out that that particular career  was a reasonably achievable one, and Betty’s tattoo apprenticeship began not long thereafter. She studied under Dustin Ranck of Icon Tattoo, who also taught her to watercolor. She worked as an artist at Icon from 2009 until 2019, when a bad case of burn out hit. In the following 5 years, she tried many careers, including hospital secretary, radio tower climber and technician, motorcycle leather seamstress, nanny, janitor, and bartender, before ultimately arriving back at her love of art and tattooing. She became re-licensed to tattoo in 2025 and now works at Suite C Tattoo Studio in SE Portland.