Cei

Young Cei woke up each morning to the songs of meadowlarks. Growing up just south of Denver, his backyard was Cherry Creek Reservoir. Literally. He could hop the fence at the back of his home and land in a small slice of heavenly wilderness. 

Of course, as he grew older, his passion for nature, the mountains—and, more specifically, learning how to navigate it all—only increased. 

“A lot of people from the East Coast and West Coast have told me that without the ocean, they feel funny,” Cei says. “Without the mountains, I feel funny. I don’t know where I am. It feels like a strange place.”

He’s studied wildlife biology, trained for extreme wilderness situations (including avalanches), volunteered in wildlife rehabilitation, and worked with the National Outdoor Leadership School. The wilderness, he describes, “reframes what is important—and why.”

Today, Cei still stays active outside while running a tattoo shop in Fort Collins: Meadowlark Tattoo.

“Meadowlarks, in my opinion, have one of—I really like birds, generally—but they make one of the most beautiful songs. Or so I think.” He pauses to play a recording on his phone. “So it’s very subtle. It’s very beautiful. And growing up, that was how I would wake up every day. 

“It’s very funny: the meadowlark is actually the most common state bird, but it is not the Colorado state bird. So I named the shop that, and that really makes me feel very much at home.”

Cei tattoos plants and animals; he enjoys drawing birds most, especially accompanied by a flower. One of his own tattoos—maybe his favorite—is an eastern screech owl that looks very much like a bird he cares for at the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program.

Cei doesn’t wish to live or work anywhere else. He first moved to Fort Collins in 2006 for veterinary school; he got to know his wife in the college town, although they tell people they first met on Craigslist.

“She was up here, and she had rented a house and was looking for housemates to rent out the rooms. I responded to her Craigslist ad. We met up at a coffee shop that’s no longer here and hit it off really, really well.

“She called me the next day and said, ‘I really like you, so you can’t move in.’

“I said, ‘That’s totally fine. I’ll find somewhere to live. But would you like to go to dinner?’”

The couple moved to Boston for a time but returned to Colorado in 2019. They “Airbnb’ed” around the state, searching for the right spot to settle down in.

“I personally wanted to live in Nederland, and she pointed out that there’s no Wi-Fi or jobs—which is a fair point. So we poked around, and we were just like, ‘You know, Fort Collins is awesome. Let’s get back.”

Cei recognizes that the plans of younger Coloradans and those thinking of moving to the Centennial State often hit a cost-of-living roadblock. To them, he advises:

“Look further out. Look on the Western Slope. Look on the Eastern Plains. Outside of that I-25 corridor, there’s some really, really cool stuff happening, and there’s some really cool opportunities. There’s small towns; there’s affordable places to live; there’s places that have jobs. 

“They need people to work. And a lot of those jobs are agricultural, and I think there’s a little bit of stigma around that. But actually, growing up kind of a suburban kid in an upper middle-class family where, like, it’s supposed to be ‘doctor, lawyer, business person, banker’—one of those things—I wish I’d known more about agriculture, because I actually think I would have found potentially some interesting stuff in that.”