Four teens who visited the same tattoo artist in Pasadena were infected by a drug resistant infection. It is unknown whether the artist will face any criminal charges.

…the teens contracted MRSA after being tattooed by an artist working out of a home basement. Staph bacteria can cause infections as minor as a small pimple or boil, or as major as a blood infection or pneumonia.

Reuters picked up an interesting (and predictable) story about post-Katrina tattoos New Orleans residents are getting inked with. If you have any photographs of these please send them to me!

On a recent night at Crescent City Tattoo in New Orleans, she is lined up with about a dozen others to have messages and images inked on their bodies, many prompted by the killer storm that ripped through New Orleans seven weeks earlier.

If you want to join the US Coast Guard your tattoos could disqualify you.

Tattoos on the face and neck have been banned for the past 30 years. Now tattoos are prohibited from the hands, too, so that nothing shows in the dress uniform. Current Coast Guardsmen with tattoos are grandfathered in.

A new heart tattoo flash sheet by Jinx has been added to Top Tattoo Designs. This flash sheet has 5 seperate heart tattoo designs.

I found a cool website for a Japanese tattoo studio. They do some very clean designs which you can see in their online gallery. They also have a searchable database full of photos of thousands of tattoos.

I recieved this in my e-mail today:

The Revolution is Free Art Show is a touring art exhibit with the goal raising money to support arts in education in both local communities and on a national level. All after cost proceeds, including sales of original work, prints, t-shirts, raffle items, and flash will be donated directly to local schools and Americans for the Arts, a national nonprofit arts organization who lobby on behalf of arts in education. We invite you to participate in the group show, which is scheduled to launch the evening of April 8th 2006 at Transcend Tattoo and Art Gallery in Branford, CT at an event open to the public. The will then be hosted by Visions Tattoo, Piercing & Art Gallery in Medway, MA, subsequent locations to be announced.

For more information see ItsYourLand.com or contact Kevin at (203) 481-9372.

Organizers expect at least 15,000 people to attend this weekend and plan to make the London convention an annual gathering, according to Roland Hyams, a spokesman for the convention’s organizing committee.

- Mecury News

You can learn more about the London Tattoo Convention at their official website.

Two news by Jinx have been added to Top Tattoo Designs. One is a tramp stamp skull tattoo, which is a lower back tattoo. The other is a shiv tattoo — this is something new that I’ve never seen before!

I found an interesting article about a Bulgarian tattoo artist.

“Tattoos are one of the fields where Bulgaria is far behind other countries. For example, tattoo artists in Bulgaria now are like the tattoo artists in the US 20 years ago. There are a lot of things we have to learn- not only the people who make tattoos, but society as a whole,” said Nikolay on the current situation of the tattoo industry in Bulgaria.