Oh, no. I'm sitting down to write and I've hit a stone wall. Over the last nine years, I've written over 50 of these Editor thingies and I've plum run out of ideas. I look back at the ones from the past. I especially liked writing about my wanting to have a tattoo name, but I got a bunch of hate mail saying I wasn't a tattoo artist and didn't deserve a tattoo name. When I reflected fondly on the fact that so many unforgettable artists have come in and out of my life, one reader wrote, "If you weren't such a jerk, they'd still be around."

But just as I was about to search the cupboard for some cooking sherry, my wife of one week, Mary, stopped swearing at her new sewing machine long enough to offer some cool, clear advice.

"Tell them about the mail you get. How you think there's so many artists that can't draw and way too many tattoo shops, but in comes a letter from some amazing new artist from some town you never heard of. Talk about the smile on your face when you discover their stack of absolutely spellbinding work. Talk about how you pound your fist and say, "Yeah, momma!" Tell them how you can't wait to get them on the phone. Tell them how encouraging that is.

"Or the fact that tattooing is always reinventing itself. Just look at Bill and Junii Salmon. They're changing their whole lives by opening a street shop. How your friend Leo Zulueta packed up and moved off the beaten track to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

"Tell them about your doctor going to Burning Man and mentioning SKIN & INK to some girl with an arm tattoo and getting hugged. Or the snooty waiter at the restaurant who asked if you knew Jack Rudy? Or the guy at the UPS depot who showed you his ink from Iraq?

"Tell them how, everyday without fail, tattooing makes a difference in our lives. How there's continually positive reactions. How conversations get started with absolute strangers. How even the toughest street monkeys ask, 'Who did your ink?'

"Tell them how I got your name tattooed on me, even though we only knew each other a month. How you had your son Noah tattoo my name on your shinbone. Tell them how your sister got a bird tattooed on her arm from Surfer John and how she can't stop showing it off to everyone in Manhattan. Write about that."

Whew, I got married just in the nick of time!

Bob Baxter
Editor in Chief