Kiki de Montparnasse blouse; Lisa Marie Fernandez bikini bottoms; Kenneth Jay Lane earrings and ring; Loree Rodkin rings; Bulgari bracelet.

There was graffiti everywhere,” Eve says about growing up in the Mill Creek housing projects in West Philadelphia. “It was the thing that you tried to do. We always tried to make our names in graffiti letters.” When most people hear the word hip-hop, the first thing they think of is music, especially rap, which Eve is obviously familiar with. But hip-hop culture also encompasses deejaying, breaking, and beatboxing, and its artistic expression is graffiti.

“This is fucking cool,” she says, pulling out a camera to take a few shots of a mural by tattoo artist Mike Giant, a.k.a. Giant One, the first stop on our walking tour of street art at New York’s Lower East Side. “I grew up with hip-hop, and graffiti for me, back in the day, was just spray paint,” Eve says. But time spent in London while touring Europe recently piqued her interest in the art. “To them, graffiti is a picture manipulated and put on a concrete surface. It’s a huge culture over there, so I wanted to see what’s up in New York.”

Little did Eve know, much of New York’s graffiti scene traces its origins to her hometown. According to Gabriel Schoenberg, who’s taking us on one of his Graffiti Tours, New York stole Philly’s hand-style tags and murals in the ’70s. In the 1980s, the city found its own identity with “burners”—subway cars spray painted in graffiti that helped expose the art to a wider audience, leading to a boom in the ’90s and the current acceptance and acclaim that allows artists like Banksy to achieve mainstream success today.

We stop in front of Mike Giant’s mural featuring a tattooed pinup girl with the word Missbehave arching over her head. The tattoos are hand-drawn with the artist’s signature Sharpie. The mural and neighborhood trigger a memory for Eve. “I think I got my spider down here,” she says about the tattoo on her left shoulder. For Eve, usually the itch to get a tattoo comes first, then she comes up with something that means something to her and heads to the tattoo parlor. To her, spiders are delicate in size but their web-weaving makes them strong and artistic.

But the story behind her most famous tattoos lacks poetry. Eve, 18 at the time, knew she wanted paw prints. A girlfriend dared her to get them on her breasts, so she decided What the hell? and went for it. “My mom said it was the tackiest thing she’d ever seen,” Eve says. Yet years later it was her mom who insisted she not remove them. “Hey, you don’t mess with your trademark, right?”

The mural in front of us features a watercolor-like row of smiling faces, an effect achieved by mixing aerosol spray paint with water. “There are three types of graffiti writers: graffiti criminals, graffiti vandals, and graffiti artists,” explains local graffiti artist Antonio “Chico” Garcia, who has been painting the neighborhood for 30 years and is helping lead our tour. “We focus on showing the art part.” This particular mural is part of an outreach program that shows kids how street art can be constructive, not destructive. Eve snaps another picture. “Coming from the hood, this has given me a chance to see the world,” Chico says of being commissioned to create his art in far-off lands.