Earlier today my son and his friends were playing games on the Wii at our house. This is a common thing because for some reason I just can't run the little buggers away. They are like bay bay's kids. I mean seriously. If anyone is out there that remembers the bay bay's kids' motto: "we don't die, we multiply" then you know what I mean. Anyways I digressed, back to the topic at hand. Like I was saying a second ago, my son and his friend's were at my house along with his friend's cousin. I came into the family room to get a book to read while the natives were occupied, when I saw a horrible horrible and I do mean horrible tattoo on the cousin's right forearm. At first I thought that maybe the thing was just drawn on with a perminant marker and dusted with talcum powder to make it appear to be a really horrible tattoo because child is only 15 years old for goodness sake. Who in their right mind would allow their 15 year old kid to go and get a tattoo (in my state, a child has to have a parent's signed permission to get tattoos and/or piercings until they are 18 and cannot obtain them with permission until they are 16) let alone get such a horrible one. The thing looked like a warped and battered corkscrew that was straightened out with a pair of rusty pliers or something. i mean it was terrible. Once I realized it was real I just had to let go of my usual language filter and say it " son who tha hell happened to your arm and did you whoop that ass when they finished because they really messed your arm up! What did your momma say when she saw it, if it was me I woulda removed it myself with a box of sandpaper when you came home with that mess!" All of the kids started to laugh but I wasn't trying to be funny, I was serious. Then he said " Oh miss Tasha my brother did it. He was free styling a cross. It started out lookin tight then it wound up lookin like this" like that made it ok just because his brother put that horrible tattoo on his arm. Then one of the other boys said " So was he drunk as a skunk or pissy drunk because he had to be in order to think that mess looks like a cross." Once again all of the kids started laughing.
Then he goes on to tell me that his brother had just gotten the tattoo gun off the net and he was allowing him to practice on him. Then he says that his brother was only 17 when he created that monstrosity on his arm. When I said " why in the hell would you allow a person who you know is not only an amateur but is not an adult? You were asking to get screwed up." Then the other boys decided to "school" me on the fact that a tattoo artist doesn't have to be an adult to be good and showed me their tattoos. These kids were between the ages of 14 and 17 and all of them had between one and six tattoos. All of their tattoos had been done by other teenagers. I was flabbergasted. Here in my living room were several kids with real tattoos done by other teenagers. Granted they had good work done to them by their standards, ok work by my standards, I was amazed that they would have the courage to have something permanently put on their body by another child. They said it was the only way they could get a tattoo done because most of the good shops in town won't even touch them with permission and with another teen they can avoid asking their parents if they can get a tattoo. They also get piercings done this way also. One of the boys then said to me " what could my mom say about it? It was done now. She can't go back and change it and it would cost more than she can afford to remove it. She was mad and said not to get anymore but in the end all she could do was accept it". Then he proceeded to show me the other three he got after she told him not to get anymore. I guess he was right about the fact that all she could do was accept it. When I told him that if it was my son that came home with an unauthorized tattoo, I would have had to remove it myself with some sandpaper if I had too. One of the other kids asked me how I could say my kid's can't have a tattoo when i have several of them. " The difference," I told him, " is I was 23 years old, an adult, fully able to make the decision to have a tattoo done and I also had sense enough to research tattoo shops and artists before I had my work done. That is why all of my tattoos are beautiful works of art and not some screwed up tattoo that I will be ashamed of my whole life." Then the first child with the supposed cross tattoos (I know I've said this several times now but this was a horrible tattoos) had the nerve to tell me that he was going to get that terrible tattoo fixed by, you guessed it, another child tattoo artist. The fact that these kids are getting unauthorized tattoos and piercings by other kids in order to go around the authority of their parents and the law opened up my mind more than it already was. I realized that I was one of those judgmental people that I didn't want to be like. I would always have the thoughts of "what kind of bad parent would let their child get a piercing in their _________ (you fill in the blank)." Or I would think "Who in their right mind lets their kid get a tattoo on their face/neck/forearm." when those parents could just be stressed out parents of rebellious kids who did it to themselves.
What do you guys out there in internet land think? What would you do if your child came home with a terrible tattoo or a tattoo in general done by an illegal child tattoo artist? Please leave a comment, I would really like to know.
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