For starters, a giant taint punch to Typepad for not having spell check on here. I never realize how dopey I sound until after I post. Of course, that's my fault for not properly proofreading, but this is the cyber age, damnit! Someone else is supposed to do it for me!
Anyway, after a re-read of some of my old posts and cringing over the typos and errors, I realized I had alluded to my favorite story about the tattoo grab bag but never posted about it. So, here goes.
The last shop I worked at was in a college town. Before you get any ideas, let me tell you that a college town is a great place to work as a tattoo artist, and it's not even because of the influx of fresh meat every year. In general, the townies are a little more youthful in the mind and are surprisingly open to more creative tattoo ideas. Sure, we had our share of frat boys and sorrority girls getting dumb little shit on their ankles. But for the most part, the clientele was great, I had a lot of fun, and I did some really beautiful custom work. However, that college town youthful exuberance often tips over into recklessness. From where I sit, that is often a good thing as it's incredibly entertaining.
We had been getting phone calls all of a sudden, lots of them, asking if we had a grab bag. For those of you not in the know, it works like this: There is a selection of small designs from which you can choose and they're done at very low prices. Some shops will have the designs on a sheet of flash and you pick out what you want. That's pretty popular around Friday the 13th, the shop will do the tattoo for 13 bucks and more or less demand a 7 dollar tip. There's alway a catch, people. We get something out of it whether you realize it or not. Read on and you'll see what I mean. Some shops, however, will cut out small designs and put them into a bag or a box and you make a blind pick. That's what we did. Our shop minimum was $60, but anything out of the box was $40. If you didn't like what you got and wanted to pick again, it was $10 every time. If your expectations were low, you could get something for $40 that would normally cost $80 or even $100.
Now, that seems like a silly idea from a business standpoint. Why would you give tattoos away for half off if you could easily charge full price? And who would get a tattoo at random with no choice of the design, just to save a few bucks? A lot of people, apparently, as we were getting phone call after phone call asking for it. So, we decided to give the people what they want. But, being the sadistic creep that I am, I wasn't about to put a bunch of flowers and skulls and butterflies in there. I'm not about to give away my bread and butter for less! I got out a pice of paper and drew the stupidest silver-dollar sized tattoos I could think of: A flying penis shooting a huge spurt of cum, a swirly cartoon pile of shit with little flies buzzing around it, a toilet, a piece of moldy cheese with little stink lines radiating from it, and so on. I saw it this way: If someone was ballsy or crazy enough to stick their hand in a box and get a tattoo of whatever came out, they were ballsy or crazy enough to get a tattoo of the ass end of a cow or a dancing hot dog.
We put the box on the counter and watched the games begin. People went nuts for it. They laughed their asses off and so did we. Rarely did anyone pick again after their first selection, most of them took what they got and thought it was hilarious. We didn't really care about doing the tattoos for cheap because it was so fucking funny to tattoo a roll of toilet paper on someone. None of the tattoos took more than five minutes. To get paid 20 bucks to laugh my ass off for five minutes, well, that was a good deal from where I sat.
So one day I had this young man in my chair. His friend paced around nervously as he watched me at work. He was untattooed and was rather rattled by the idea of the whole thing. The guy I was tattooing kept egging his friend on, telling him to get a tattoo, which only seemed to make him more nervous. After a time, he spotted the grab bag box on the counter and asked about it. I explained how it worked and the guy in my chair lit up like a Christmas tree. "Do it, dude! Do it!" He kept repeating. His friend got all green around the gills about a blind pick, until the guy in my chair said, "If you do it, I'll get one, and I'll pay for yours."
Now, at this point, let me mention that this guy was getting a big tribal that cost a few hundred bucks. So I said to him, "I tell you what....You get something out of that box and I will put it on you for free. I already have all the shit out and I could use the entertainment." He almost leaped off the chair and began barking at his friend to bring the box over so he could pick something. He shoved his hand in and dug around furiously. I sat back with a smile, waiting to see what he had selected. Triumphantly, he pulled out a small piece of paper, flipped it over to reveal...cartoon pile of poop with flies.
His face fell. "Oh," he said dejectedly."I'm not getting this."
"Why not?" I asked. "No charge, have some balls, come on. You were all over that a minute ago."
He looked incredibly uncomfortable, and his shoulders slumped as if he had an air leak somewhere. "Well, I didn't know it was gonna be something like that."
I asked him, "Well, for forty bucks, what did you think was gonna be in there? A whole backpiece or something?"
"I dunno....I just....never mind."
People, really. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I got a $13 Friday the 13th tattoo at a convention once. It wasn't a blind pick, but I got a pretty dumb little tattoo. It's one of my favorites, though, simply because it's so stupid. You have to understand that if you're getting something for less, you're getting less of something. You also should not expect a bunch of creepers like tattoo artists to NOT take advantage of something like your willingness to get some tattoo, any tattoo, at a discount. You do realize we pay our bills doing the big tribals and fairies and stuff like that. If you come in and say, "I'll take whatever you can give me for peanuts," well, by golly, you're gonna get a pile of poo or a flying dick or stinky cheese. We're a bunch of weirdos, we can't possibly work at a normal job because we're nuts and that's the beginning and the end of it. So if you're willing to trust our nuttiness, you get what you get. Grab bags are not for you, they are for the amusement of the tattoo artist.