Agent Provocateur bustier and panties; Chinese Laundry shoes.

Ellyse Amelia is studying to be a vegetarian chef while writing a novel about a blood-sucking vampire. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, but gets tattooed in south Florida. She’s done most of her recent artwork in pencil, but she’s covered in ink. Yes, Ellyse, 22, is definitely a woman of wide and varied interests.

“I guess that’s true,” she laughs. “I’m just a creative person.” It’s one of the reasons she decided to leave her job as an EKG technician at a hospital in Florida and begin taking classes at New York City’s Natural Gourmet Institute. “I love to cook—it’s a way for me to see instant gratification of the creative process.”

Other outlets for her creativity are the pencil drawings and collages she does, the book she’s writing about a lesbian vampire who’s stuck in what could be considered vampire purgatory, and, of course, her tattoos. “I got the first when I was 16, with my mom,” she says. “Then my grandmother saw ours and decided to get one too.”

She went on to get more artwork than the other women in her family, and much of it—including a passage from The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, and a line from the Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “If I can stop one heart from breaking”—has been inspired by her love of literature. She also has a few hand-poked tattoos that she did herself. The largest piece, however, is still a work in progress. “The phoenix on my back is from my friend Jamie [Smith] at South Florida Tattoo. Next time I go back he’s going to brighten it up with some orange and Tokyo Pink so it really pops.”

She’s got plenty of other plans for the future. In addition to her chef training, Ellyse is studying to become a certified trainer. “Eventually, I want to be a personal chef and trainer so I can help others complete their lives and become the healthiest people they can be,” she says.