Time for another tattoo road trip! The last two, North Carolina (Asheville, Charlotte and Winston-Salem) and Boise, Idaho, took me, photographer Bernard Clark and my wife Mary on a juggernaut to visit, firsthand, some of the fantastic tattoo shops dotted around this ink-tastic country of ours.

This time, we took along our dog Jack and headed south from Portland, Oregon. With three month's planning behind us, we rolled down the Interstate, through ice storms, small towns, farmlands, high deserts, low deserts?we traversed them all, from the Mojave to Riverside and west to the San Fernando Valley. It was nine days on the highway, documenting the not-so-mainstream tattoo parlors of the Southern California outskirts. And speaking of skirts, our first stop was Tattoo Room, the Simi Valley shop of longtime SKIN&INK columnist Dani Oberosler. Then on to Jojo Ackermann at American Made Tattoo in Rosamond and Mike Pike at Psycho City in Lancaster. Then Jamie Schene and Nikko Hurtado at Ignition Tattoo in Apple Valley, Sean Warcott at Empire Tattoo in Riverside and finishing off with a stop in Reseda with Team Triple Threat, a heavily tattooed motorcycle stunt squad that provided a tail-standing, hundred-mile-per-hour afternoon with some of the best, heavily tattooed homeboys and bikini girls our cameras have ever captured. Tons of great backpieces and black-and-gray work by SoCal's very best Latino inkers.

And we're not jamming everyone into one, single story. Each shop will get their own feature, starting this month and continuing in future issues down the road. So, stay tuned!

But like any road adventure, there were plenty of surprises. While most shops closed for business while we were photographing, one shop stayed open—with beer cans in hand. A major no-no, so we split. Hey, these posers didn't even have the sense or courtesy to comb the parking lot and sweep up the discarded hypodermic needles littering the gutter. Another case of a shop that's happy to reap the benefits of tattooing and not have a clue about how to represent.

The second, just plain stiffed us. A famous shop we were looking forward to covering, all we got was blank stares and limp excuses when we came through the door, me from a thousand miles away in Portland and Bernard from Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Ackerman had a shop full of customers to photograph, as did Mike Pike and Sean Warcott. Triple Threat's shoot was a mob scene. Maybe forty people. As for the guys that stiffed us, they didn't even get up out of their chairs to say hello.

But the tattoo gods were smiling, because when we returned three hours early to our hotel, waiting for us, totally by coincidence, in front of the lobby, was one of the most inspiring stories of the entire trip: a visit with the fully tattooed spokesman for the Paralyzed Veterans of America, Mike Sprouse, sitting astride his sleek, hand-powered racing bike. Mike was there in Redlands for four days of bicycle races. Plus, he's a longtime SKIN&INK subscriber. Forget the bad experiences, this was frosting on the cake. Almost too good to be true. Just another example of the inspiring and colorful world just outside our doors and down the road, in this, the most wonderful world of tattoos.

Bob Baxter
Editor in Chief

baxter@skin&ink.com
www.skinandink.com