I have an older woman in my chair and I'm fixing up a crappy tattoo she got elsewhere. She says to me, "This is my first tattoo. My husband had a fit. I really wanna get another one, but I can't until after he's dead." I laugh and then she says, "It won't be long. I can't wait."
I didn't laugh at that.
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A mom with her two kids comes in to ask questions. She picks up one of our cards off the counter and says, "This is you? _______ Tattoo?"
I make a funny face, take an exaggerated look around and say, "Last time I checked."
"No, but this is you? _______ Tattoo?"
"No," I reply, "We have cards for another tattoo shop at our tattoo shop."
She catches on to my sarcasm and says, "Well, I'm just checking, you know, I wanna be sure."
I think my humor is wasted on most people. I should just answer the damn stupid questions.
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An older guy comes in, Bluetooth in ear, doing the open-mouth tough guy gum-chew. I'm in the middle of a tattoo and I ask if he needs help.
"I have a 2:00 appointment, I was wondering if I could get in early, " he says.
"Who's your appointment with?" I ask.
He reaches into his wallet and pulls out one of our shop cards and holds it up to show me the backside, where one of my co-workers has scrawled their name and the appointment time. I'm sitting a good twelve feet from the counter, so I cannot read it.
"What's that say, man? I'm too far away, I can't read that."
Instead of reading me the name, he moves the card about six inches closer to me. I can't read any better at 11.5 feet than I can at 12. Luckily, the artist he had the appointment with came walking up right before I barked, "Just fucking read it to me, will ya?"
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This happens so often I can't single out one incident anymore: Someone comes in and shows me an image on their phone. I get busy working on a drawing and they begin to meander around and flip through the racks. After a minute, they turn back to me and say, in a voice dripping with incredulous scorn, "Do people actually come in here and just get stuff off the wall?"
My answer is this: "What's the difference between picking something off the wall and picking something off the internet? Google and Pintrest are just giant flash racks."
They always look amazed after I say that, and say something to the effect of, "I never thought of it that way....." The funny thing is, 49 times out of 50, what they have brought me is not even a photo of a drawing, it's a photo of an actual tattoo that has actually been done on an actual person. I have to try hard to resist the temptation to point out that anyone who picks a design off the rack is showing a little more thought and originality than someone who is bringing in a photo of an actual tattoo on someone else's body. There is a chance the design on the flash rack has never been done on anyone. A photo of a tattoo is proof that the design actually has been done already. It's tough to refrain from calling people hypocritical snobs.
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OLDER WOMAN: I want a little rose on my ankle.
YOUNGER WOMAN: (scoffing) Oh, God, really?
OW: What? I like roses.
ME: It's a classic, there's nothing wrong with that.
YW: I dunno, I just--Everybody does that. I can't do that. I gotta be different, you know? I mean, I gotta do my thing, you know, I can't do what everybody does. I wanna get a treble clef and a bass clef in the shape of a heart.
(If you don't know why that's funny, click here.)
