Tattoo Expo

Coral Springs was recently invaded by hundreds of thousands of tattooed, and non-tattooed, folks from all over the world. It's the South Florida Tattoo Expo, and I've been going every year for the past seven years, and I figured, why break the tradition? It wasn't free to go, you had to shell out $15 to get in the door, but it was well worth the money. There were live bands all day and a ton of giveaways. There was a decent turnout, better than I expected. I charged up my Nikon and headed out to the show. I wish I could say that what I saw totally blew my mind, but I've been going to tattoo shows and getting tattooed for ten years now.

If anything, the show was a little tame this year...

Because I didn't take any notes and ended up getting drunk right afterwards and forgetting a lot of stuff, I bring you Snark on a Blog (I've been holding in my SoaP pun for so long, and this is the only place I write and don't get paid, so deal with it).
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This was one of two chicks I saw with full back pieces, this one wins hands down. The other girl had a huge leopard print heart outlined in blood. Lame. But, what I like about this one is how her backfat forms little support shelves for the leafy structures. Although the artist did work really well with her form.

Some dude getting a biometric chest piece. I can't remember taking this picture. My Girlfriend was using my camera at a few points, so I'm gonna chalk that up to her work.

'nuff said.

You can't tell from this photo, but the kid getting tattooed was wearing Misfits shoes, they had that little skull face on the toes. I couldn't get close enough to see, but I think that's the tattoo he was getting also. This brings me to something I used to tell people a lot when I was hanging out around tattoo parlors and drawing flash for people, "You better be Henry fucking Rollins if you are gonna get a Black Flag tattoo."

Sometimes they just use sharpies.

We circled the convention a dozen times and on each pass this girl had the same look on her face. For three hours she didn't even shift position.

If you figure this picture out, please email me.

Well, it was a tattoo convention, so I took about 250 pics of people getting tattooed to add to my stock image gallery I'm building up. These are some of the better ones, but I got a lot of really cool needle on skin action.

The convention was in a Marriott Hotel out west, WAY TOO FAR WEST. I hate going west of I-95, and these people had me out on 75. Oh well.

The dude on the left was being photographed by a Sentinel guy right at this moment, and he saw me looking scraggy with my decent camera and I'm pretty sure he thought I was from a tattoo magazine because of the badge I had on.

I love this shot. This guy is totally Zen'd out. He was listening to his iPod and was breathing so shallow that he looked dead. It was amazing. Aside from his massive chest piece he looked like he didn't have any other tattoos.

Those little light tables are great for tracing.

If anyone knows who this is, please let me know. She was some type of news journalist for a spanish station. I kept seeing her around talking to people, then I turned a corner and she's being filmed from three angles while getting a tramp stamp. As soon as the cameras were off the started wincing terribly. But, I'll save those when I finally figure out who she is.

It's a guy in a thong. I don't know why. He was getting his calf tattooed.

They randomly had two overheated Tigers out front. People were clicking and snapping at them, and at one point the one in the open let out a nice growl. But, otherwise they laid there in the 90-plus degree heat panting deeply while the keepers rubbed them with ice. Inhumane? You decide.
I think this girl is semi-famous from somewhere because she signed a pic for some guy.

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