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Sandra Mendez is a tattoo artist, but not the kind you're likely to have heard of. She uses skills she learned in school to help women achieve the look they're after, giving them, for example, permanent eyebrows or eyeliner.

She provides her services for free to one woman each month—to breast cancer patients and to women who've lost hair to illness.

“One day I just wished I could have eyebrows, because I didn't feel like a whole face, I didn't feel like my face was mine,” says Nicole Gordon Levine, a hair loss patient.

Levine says tattoos replaced the hair she lost in her eyebrows in the mid-1990s and says she couldn't afford the procedure, which could cost up to $1,000.

“I don't have an insurance plan that would ever cover something like that, because it is considered cosmetics, although to me it was like a lifeline,” says Levine.

“I was just hearing about more and more cases like this, and I felt that it was only fair to give back to people who can't afford it,” says Mendez.

Mendez also provides services to breast cancer survivors who have had a mastectomy.

One woman who did not want to have her face on camera had breast reconstruction surgery but says she won't feel whole until Mendez performs a cosmetic procedure which could otherwise cost $1,800.

“I ended up being diagnosed at 30 and had to have a double mastectomy,” says the woman, “but there’s no color and there’s nothing done to recreate the nipple area, so that's what the tattoo is for.”

Mendez hopes other people in her profession will follow her lead.

“I’m trying to get the word out to other paramedical tattoo artists and to gift tattoos to these women,” says Mendez.

For giving a gift to women by helping them feel whole again, Sandra Mendez is the latest New Yorker of the week.