Show Me Your Dick

There was a little skeleton mummy wearing a cowboy hat standing in front of the Altered Flesh Tattoo booth, and whoever at Altered Flesh decided this little guy was going to work the aisle deserves some credit, since I saw him, stopped and took the picture. He was parked beside a capsule machine with a giant yellow Instagram sign behind him, artwork hanging everywhere, prints covering the tables and enough stuff packed into the booth to make it clear nobody was relying on a polite little banner and hoping people would wander over. This is the weird shit I look for at tattoo conventions, since every artist in the building came there with tattoos worth showing and Altered Flesh apparently decided their marketing department needed a dead cowboy.

A little farther into their booth, I found out the dead cowboy wasn't even their strongest employee. Sitting among the prints, stickers and merchandise was a framed Japanese Oni piece announcing SHOW ME YOUR DICK. There were copies underneath it, three-dollar stickers nearby, ten dollar air fresheners and plenty of other shit for sale but Altered Flesh had pretty much ended the competition at that point. Nobody walks past SHOW ME YOUR DICK wondering what the air freshener smells like.

There is some seriously good work being done at these shows, but good work doesn't automatically make anybody stop when you can be an incredible tattoo artist sitting twenty feet from another incredible tattoo artist who is sitting twenty feet from another one, and the person coming down that aisle has already looked at enough tattoos to wallpaper their house.

Everybody has photographs, flash, an Instagram account and a banner with their name on it, so after enough booths even great work can start disappearing into everything around it. Altered Flesh understood the part nobody puts on the application when artists sign up for these conventions: before anybody can give a shit about what's inside your portfolio, you have to get them close enough to open it.

Apparently, a skeleton mummy cowboy is one option, and of course, asking to see your dick is another. I've seen artists attack this from every direction, with booths that look expensive enough to have their own valet parking sitting a few aisles away from booths that look like a yard sale got drunk and discovered tattooing.

Skulls, mannequins, and pets show up. Then there's the candy, toys, shirts, stickers, wheel give aways, all those cheesy props. And after seeing enough of these setups, you start appreciating how much thought goes into getting people to look before the artist ever gets a chance to show them what really matters. Nobody expects you to see a skeleton mummy cowboy from across the room and immediately surrender an arm for six hours, but if the little guy gets you close enough to look through the portfolio behind him, he has earned his fucking hat.

A tattoo shop gives an artist control over almost everything around them, but a convention hands that control over to a crowd that has hundreds of other places to spend its money. Nobody owes your booth a stop, and being talented doesn't buy you one. You brought your work, the artist across the aisle brought theirs, and the people passing between you are making decisions before either of you get a chance to say a word. That puts artists in the strange position of having spent years learning how to tattoo only to arrive at a convention and discover they also need to be pretty good at getting people to look at them.

I pay attention to these booths for exactly that reason, since you can see artists trying to solve the same problem without any agreement on what the answer is supposed to look like. Some barely put anything up and let a few large photographs carry the booth, while others cover every available surface until you start wondering if they brought a tattoo machine or just emptied their garage into a U Haul, and plenty land somewhere between the two. I'm not judging anybody's ability to tattoo from the decorations around their table, but I am looking at who can make me stop, since I'm doing exactly what everybody else walking those aisles is doing whether I'm carrying a camera or looking for my next artist.

The same fight gets considerably uglier once everybody goes home and the convention floor becomes Instagram. At least the booth beside you has to fit inside ten feet of pipe and drape; online you're fighting thousands of tattoo artists mixed in with videos, ads, food, arguments and whatever other bullshit gets dropped onto a person's screen. An artist can post an incredible piece and watch it disappear into that pile, leaving us with more tattoo work available to look at than we could ever possibly consume and artists thirty minutes away from potential clients who still have no clue they exist.

Giving artists more exposure sounds great until everybody gets more exposure and now you've got ten thousand people standing on the internet screaming LOOK AT MY SHIT at the same time. The person looking for a tattoo doesn't need another mountain of tattoo content dumped in front of them, and the artist shouldn't have to become a dancing fucking content creator just to prove they know what they're doing with a tattoo machine. There could be an incredible artist thirty minutes away doing exactly what you want, and you'll never see their work since the algorithm decided you needed another video of a raccoon dry humping a squirrel instead.

Inker was built to cut through that shit. Tell us what kind of tattoo you want and let the work lead you to the artist, see who actually does it, find out where they are and go from there. The artist gets a chance to be found for being good at tattooing instead of being good at feeding an algorithm, and you get to look for the tattoo you actually want without spending half the night digging through hashtags like you're trying to locate a fugitive. No dancing required, no begging for likes, no skeleton mummy cowboy standing in your living room trying to get your attention.

Altered Flesh can keep him, they earned him, lol.

And whoever decided to put SHOW ME YOUR DICK on that table knew exactly what they were doing too, since out of everything fighting for my attention at that convention, I stopped at their booth, raised my camera twice and took both of these pictures.

Now I'm writing about them. So Altered Flesh, congratulations.

Your weird shit worked.

J Gekko
Staff Writer, Inker