By the time she moved to Delray Beach, Ronda Gale was more than ready for the next phase of her life. The native New Yorker had begun visiting South Florida regularly around 2016 to care for her father in Broward County. His eventual death, after suffering with dementia, would be one domino in a series of tragic life events: Her mother, older brother, and best friend also died within a 12-month period, during which she left her husband of 11 years.
A tattoo artist, painter, and sculptor, Gale grew up in Long Beach, on Long Island, surrounded by water. She always felt connected to the ocean, so Delray, with its mixture of sun-and-surf lifestyle and art culture, was an easy sell. After that momentous 2016-2017 period, she continued to visit family here, finally renting an apartment across the street from Anchor Park on Jan. 1, 2025: A new year, a new state, a new start.
While seeking a local shop where she could tattoo, Gale joined the networking group Art Connect Palm Beach and designed a mural for Honeybee Garage in the Andre Design District. But life threw another wrench in her plans six months after her move, when she returned to Long Beach for 10 days of tattooing and joined a friend on a private boat trip. On the voyage back, the tide was high, and the captain didn’t see that the vessel was headed straight for the Amityville pier until it was too late.
“We flew over, we hit it, and launched 500 feet and landed on a beach,” Gale recalls. “Thank God we didn’t go under or flip over.” As soon as she tried to stand, she knew she had broken her neck along with the humerus bone in her right arm, which would require three surgeries; she may need a fourth. She spent a month and a half in assisted living, rehabbing daily. She still cannot lift the arm beyond a certain point. “It’s still painful if I look down too much,” she says. “It’s life-changing, because I like to roller skate, I like to surf.”
She’s also been unable to tattoo for, as of this writing, nearly a year. “I never wanted to stop; I love tattooing. It was my whole life,” she says. “It’s weird to look back and go, where did 35 years of my life go? … I’d work six, seven days a week, until 2 in the morning. It has to be your love, your world.”
Tattoos have been Gale’s passion for as long as she can remember. She studied illustration at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, then started designing temporary tattoos, and soon graduated to permanent tattoo art at legendary New York City parlors such as East Side Ink and Venus Modern Body Arts. In the 1990s, tattooing was a male-dominated industry, and she often found herself the only woman artist at tattoo conventions. “And everybody that was in the first shops were all bikers, so it was pretty rough. But I got tough. I had to be tough!”
During her heyday in New York, Gale would tattoo a bevy of celebrities and recording artists, from members of hardcore and metal bands to Sarah Michelle Gellar, David Blaine, and Tim Roth. She tattooed Rod Stewart, with the rocker screaming under her needle on the cover of the New York Post. A Scottish newspaper, which also covered Stewart’s adventures in ink, referred to Gale as “a cult figure in New York’s underground scene.” Gale also designed the temporary tattoos sported by Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, including the giant cross and scales of justice adorning his back. She remembers De Niro, a Method actor, entering the store in character as the film’s menacing ex-convict.
But this part of Gale’s life, too, would face a crushing setback. In 2021, her Long Beach employer, Abyss Tattoo, burned down from a fire that started in a neighboring butcher shop. “Every piece of artwork, every book I owned—I moved my life into that shop,” she says. But this tragedy spawned an epiphany. Only one piece of artwork survived the fire, a smoky flame logo that she designed. “It looked like it was glowing. … I’m like, this is telling me to go on this path. I was a wreck, but I took it as a sign. … I started to go in other directions, doing more art, doing more specific clientele.”
She summarized this new philosophy with a clothing and lifestyle brand that connected her interests in art, tattoos, meditation, Reiki, and skate culture. She called it Hell Her, “because we go from darkness to light,” she says. “We have to go through this adversity to get enlightenment. I believe it happens for a reason, not to us but for us, to bring us to a different place.”
Gale hopes to tattoo again, beginning with small designs on her friends, many of whom are eager to volunteer as her guinea pigs. In the meantime, she’s been creating sculptures from shell detritus recovered from Delray’s beach, combining them into roselike shapes. A selection of them is on display through Sept. 27 in the Cornell Art Museum’s “Persistence of Matter” exhibition.
Each piece feels like a symbol of her own transformation, from hell to her. “I have boxes and boxes of shells,” she says. “Everybody wants the perfect, pretty shells; I use all the pieces that are broken and ugly.
This story is from the September/October 2026 issue of Delray magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
