Profile

Jewelry designer Lori Leven opened Brooklyn Adorned in 2007 in a retrofitted refrigeration supplier’s warehouse. The brushed-steel and bare-wood space maintains an industrial feel toward the back, where sliding opaque-glass screens obscure workspaces for Adorned’s seven staff tattoo artists. But the showroom that greets customer is much more decorative: antique glass cases and jewelry drawers gleam with all manner of vintage, designer, and ethnic jewelry, from chunky pendant necklaces to massive-gauge tribal earrings, some of which Leven designed herself. Leven’s smaller East Village operation can accommodate walk-ins, but heavy-duty works are performed in Brooklyn and require an appointment. This isn’t a shop for impulse inkings; many of the clients are repeat needle-jockeys with large, complex pieces. Those with their own ideas for a design can flesh it out with tattooists in the store’s lounge-like drawing room. Adorned also has two downstairs rooms dedicated to a double-autoclave needle-sterilization process, and customers can peer through a glass wall to watch the instruments of art being cleaned for their next usage. — Alex Littlefield