De La Cerda is a Southwestern graduate with a fine arts background. She got into tattooing around 1993 in New York City when she was a Yellow Taxi driver. De La Cerda said she used to spend downtime between calls drawing and another driver suggested she get into tattooing, “He started showing me tattoo magazines and things like this. And then I started getting tattooed and I really loved it. I just fell in love with it right away. And so I harassed the local tattoo parlor into teaching me. So a year later, I was not taxi driving anymore, I was tattooing.”

De La Cerda’s move back to Jamestown to open the tattoo shop wasn’t without some bumps. When she applied for a variance two years ago to locate on East Fourth Street, it was denied by the City’s Zoning Board of Appeals. Director of Development Crystal Surdyk said the City then brought De La Cerda in to present her ideas to the Zoning Board to see what could be done, “We had some really good conversation and meaningful conversation, I think, about the zoning code as it was written. And then, Planning Commission talked about the relevance of the zoning code, or irrelevance of the zoning code as it was written, and the need to change with the times. And talk about what kind of business do we want to see in our downtown core.”

City Council passed a local ordinance in September 2020 updating the zoning code to allow for tattoo shops to operate in commercially zoned areas of the city. The Secret Undisclosed Location can reached at (716) 846-1398 or online at jamestowntattoo.com