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Cute hipster Boys and beautiful Suicide-Girls
Ink needles and Hello Kitty pins, rainbow hair, black surgical gloves, titanium jewelry, pain, more pain, beautiful girls, tough guys and old rock’n’roll music – this was the overwhelming first impression you would’ve had while entering the Tonhalle in the Kultfabrik last Saturday.
The Munich Tattoo Convention has become quite a tradition in the last couple of years. This ceremony is as much of a competition as it is a group pain-and-glamour inducing activity. Also its public is quite unconventional for a convention. The three-day event gathered many (if not most) of the local tattoo artists, along with their regular clients and a few newbies who probably came in order to get their first tattoo or just to get inspired.
Umpteen mini tattoo and piercing parlors and a few merchandise booths kept the innocent bystanders busy until the live show started on the stage. After Billy Idol’s Sweet Sixteen, which was probably the age of most of the girls who formed the semicircle around the scaffolding, an almost invisible piercing race began. Obviously it’s hard to follow the swift movements of a needle 3 meters away from you, but the guy on the microphone announced that it had made 6 holes in 2 ears in under a minute. (Wow?)
The crowd looked pretty wild and the most remarkable tattoos were some sleeves on a couple of Suicide Girl look-alikes. There were a lot of cute hipster boys and girls around and, of course, quite a few members of the rockabilly scene were browsing through new designs and making chit chat with old friends. The whole event had a vague improvised feeling to it, but overall it felt quite friendly and casual. The only disturbing thing was the presence of a few booths selling made-in-China trinkets of all sorts, from lucky gems to Snoopy bags and kitsch Celtic key chains.
Most piercings were priced around 50 to 99 euros and the cost of the tattoos varied according to the difficulty of the chosen design (and they certainly did not look cheap.) The most intriguing booth was the intimate tattoo one, all covered in red velvet. There was some occasional blood on some arms and legs but it definitely looked more fascinating than gross. There was no audible whining or visible pain, but everybody knows tattoos hurt pretty badly, so thumbs up to those brave men and women.
The only thing that seemed to be missing was a pinch of originality. All the drawings looked very skillfully executed but most of them desperately lacked imagination. Surely this wasn’t the artists’ fault; being a tattoo artist must come with a lot of compromise, sadly enough. Almost every catalog contained a rose, a skull, a ‘C’est la vie’ or a ‘I am what I am’ in a curly font, a Latin quote, a butterfly/dragon/cute cliché creature, infinite tribal patterns and quite a few examples of tramp stamps. To save the day, there were a few that celebrated Münchner beer and similar local logos but they were very rare.
It was a pleasant surprise to see that there were as many female artists as there were male and they were all incredibly busy with the skin canvases of all the ink junkies.
Corpsepainter, Voodoo Croo and Dark Desire Tattoo are just a few of the Munich Tattoo shops that interactively displayed their skill at the 2010 Tattoo and Piercing Convention; certainly there are many others who deserve to be checked out if you plan on getting your skin permanently carved.
For more info check out www.taetowiermagazin.de
Photos: courtesy of www.psalmplasma.com
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