Horrific tattoos

It’s hard to go very far in our city without seeing a tattoo. We have so many tattoos, in fact, that NBC News lists Portland in the top five most-tattooed cities in the U.S. Given the abundance of tattoo parlors in the city and all the awesome people running around with colorful bodies, it’s not a surprising label.

Unfortunately, it’s also hard to get very far without seeing bad tattoos. From misspelled script to unrecognizable blobs of color, bad tattoos are a completely avoidable evil plaguing Portland.

With that in mind, there are quite a few easy tips you can use to avoid the disaster of getting an offensive image attached to your identity.

For example, don’t draw your own tattoo design, no matter how avidly you believe you’re the next Botticelli. Human skin is a bizarre canvas, and your delicate drawing can easily turn into a dermal disaster. Tattoo artists are called that for a reason, and you should probably give them the benefit of the doubt: They know more about stabbing designs into skin than you do.

Don’t spontaneously run into the first tattoo parlor you find and assume the flash on the walls was actually drawn by the person doing the tattoos. Look at those portfolios and find out exactly what you’ll be getting.

On that note, don’t get fooled by portfolios, either. If an artist doesn’t have many pictures of their work but have been tattooing for years, they probably don’t have any work worth showing. Also, if an artist has a portfolio with a few amazing tattoos and a bunch of mediocre-bordering-on-bad tattoos, chances are you’ll end up with the latter. Look for consistency, clean work and style.

Don’t get a tattoo from someone who can’t draw straight lines. To point out the obvious, there’s somehow an endless supply of squiggly, smudgy and spotty tattoos littering the bodies of Portlanders. Look carefully at an artist’s work to see how clean their shading is, whether they color within the lines and whether the lines actually look like lines.

Don’t get something just because it has some epic meaning. Your tattoo should also look good if you’re ever planning on showing it off and telling people how symbolic it is, bro. Chances are that the friends praising how “deep” your work is are just too dismayed by your crappy tattoo to think of something better to say. Or maybe your friends suck as much as your tattoo does.

Don’t try to save money by going to a cheap shop. Just don’t do it. Not only will you have to live with the hideous graphic on your body for quite a while, but you’ll also probably end up paying much more in the long run getting it covered up or pouring money into laser removal.

Don’t go to some sketchy garage or home tattooist. Not only are you likely to leave with subpar art, but they’re also unlikely to actually have appropriate licensing and sanitation methods.

Don’t let a friend who just started tattooing put a needle anywhere near you. Bail them out of jail, pull their hair back as they throw up in a toilet, help them move their disgusting couch, just don’t ever let your inexperienced friend tattoo you. Oh, but they’re such an amazing painter? Doesn’t matter. The first tattoos they stab into a moving canvas will almost definitely be horrible, and you’re a bad friend to put the early mistakes of their career permanently on display.

Finally, after you become the pretentious tattoo snob you ought to be, make sure you take care of that thing. Follow whatever directions your presumably professional artist gives you about cleaning your sticky new tattoo when you get home, and use whatever products they recommend to help it heal as prettily as possible.

It’s also extremely important to keep your tattoo out of the sun. We’re lucky to have gray skies and dark afternoons in Portland, but slather on some sunblock when the sun makes a surprise appearance. You will undoubtedly pay unreasonable sums of money for a good tattoo, so it would be pretty stupid to go out and ruin it by not wearing sunblock.