The former sex slaves transforming their tattoos

For 17 years, Hollie was forced to sleep with countless men by several pimps. Four years ago, she finally escaped from sex trafficking.

One of her traffickers, she says, branded her with a tattoo which read “Love is Loyalty”. It’s what he did to most of the women who worked for him – either that or “Love is Royalty”.

“He wants to put his name on you. Like a keepsake – like you’re his possession. Everybody knows you’re his bitch,” she says.

Hollie was sold into sex slavery at 15 years old, after a childhood of deprivation and abuse.

Despite this difficult start in life, Hollie says she initially excelled in school.

“It was an escape from my reality. I remember being in the first grade and the teacher had the same last name as me, and I used to pretend she was my mother because I longed for a relationship with my [real] mother”.

Unable to cope, Hollie’s mother gave her to her own parents to be looked after.

“I remember being called ‘a hooker’, ‘a whore’, ‘a worthless piece of shit like my mother’, before I even knew what any of these things meant.”

Hollie says that from the age of 12 she was smoking marijuana every day at home, before quickly moving on to harder drugs.

“It was my ‘normal’ – that was just what my life was like.”

She says she was in and out of juvenile detention centres for misdemeanours like truancy and underage drinking, before finally running away from one at 15 to go back to live with her mother.

“It was one of the worst decisions of my life because within two weeks of being here, we were using drugs together. Within a month of being here, we were prostituting together.”

Hollie says that, at a point at which she was vulnerable and tired of being exploited by her mother, she was targeted by a man who asked her to join his team of sex workers.

“It looked glamorous – he had fancy jewellery, nice shoes, nice clothes, lots of money and women all around him. It looked like he took care of them and got drugs whenever they wanted it. So, I did it. I joined his team and I entered into hell.”

But what followed, Hollie says, were years of violence, sexual abuse and death threats.

“By the time I was 17 or 18 I had been raped more times than I can count. I’d been kidnapped. I’d been held hostage, stabbed and shot at.”

The environment Hollie was working in was extremely violent, and rape is often used by gangs to exert control over their trafficking victims.

So for Hollie, the tattoos forced upon her to show her loyalty to the gang became more than just undesirable adornments. They became symbols of years of trauma.

Hollie’s finger tattoo – before and after

After her escape, she heard about a charity called Survivor’s Ink – which covers branding tattoos of sex trafficking survivors for free.

She went along to choose a design to cover up the “Love is Loyalty” tattoo at the top of her back.

“It’s a flower blossoming into a butterfly, soaring into freedom. Because I feel free now. I have the choice to make decisions on my life and where I move next. I never had that before. Somebody was always controlling me like a puppet. And today, nobody controls me.”