THE NINTH ANNUAL
NEW YORK CITY TATTOO CONVENTION
BY BOB BAXTER
WITH PHOTOS BY BERNARD CLARK

Wanna know the most important thing about the New York City Tattoo Convention at Roseland? It's in New York City, that's what. Let's face it, you go to most tattoo events, and, after the late-night wrap-up, the artists have one choice: hit the nearest tittie bar. A great majority of the cities, including Los Angeles, I might add, close down at ten. The only thing up and running is the street sweeper and the all-night drugstore.

At midnight in New York City, on the other hand, the kettle is just starting to boil. Want two a.m. sushi? You got it. Early-morning live jazz? Not a problem. The best 24-hour pizza in the world? There's a slice on every street corner.

I love the hospitality we receive at tattoo events. Being lucky enough to head a tattoo magazine, when we blow into town the treatment we receive is usually way better than average. The promoters love to go out of their way to book us super-nice accommodations and reserve us a spacious room to shoot photos. At the better events, we're treated like pashas. We get guided tours of the city, rooms with mints on the pillow, our very own Jacuzzi, baskets of fruit-even an occasional icy cold bottle of champagne. But as wonderful as we've been treated, none of the tattoo events, big city or small, has Times Square, Central Park or the Empire State Building. There are, quite simply, no subways in Green Bay and not a single kosher pickle in Guadalajara.

New York City, on the other hand, has them all.

This time, for the ninth-annual event expertly produced by Butch Garcia and Steve Bonge, with the superb organizational skills of the inimitable Clayton Patterson, I arrived three days early. I wish it had been three weeks.

So what did I do with the extra time? I walked in Washington Square Park, checked out some Gibsons at Matt Umanoff's, had dinner on the patio at Mario Batali's Lupa, watched an amazing violin/piano duo play six rare Bach sonatas at the Barge Music concert series underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, had lox and a bagel at a Brazilian restaurant across from a Taiwanese street festival in Union Square, had world-class pizza at Ray's, bought a pickle on Essex Street, shopped for green tea in Chinatown, visited a yarn shop on Lafayette Street, gobbled down a turkey leg at the 30-block-long street fair on 9th Avenue and, on the way back to our hotel, crossed another street fair that covered 15 blocks of Avenue of the Americas. All that, and we hadn't even stepped inside Roseland!

As great a time as we always have in Manhattan, the icing on the cake is the tattoo convention. It's the tattoo event of the year. It's the once-a-year party nobody wants to miss. And there's so many top artists, it's difficult to count. Walking down the aisles reminded me of how it was six or seven years ago, before the convention explosion, with a different event every single weekend. At Roseland, you couldn't walk five feet without sighting another top artist or world-class collector. Without question, the NYC Convention is one of the best shows in the world, and because of that, artists don't want to give up their booths. Which means, you can count on a lot of familiar faces. It's a great place to see old friends.

Spider Webb had a booth, of course. And Jack Rudy was there, as always, in the middle aisle. Henning Jorgenson was back again from Denmark. Micky Sharpz's R.J. and Dottie were in from their new digs in North Carolina, and their good friends Bugs and Valerie (he's at R.J.'s old Tabu Tattoo location in Mar Vista, California) had a booth. Mike Bellamy took a short uptown cab ride from his shop on 36th Street and even Sean Vasquez made a rare appearance, having lived out of the country for the last few years. It was also good to see Corey Miller and Antonio Mejia from Southern California, plus SKIN&INK columnists Erik Desmond and Aaron Bell-Aaron from Seattle and Erik from West Hempstead, New York. Upstairs, there were two contingents of Japanese hand-pokers, along with our pal Andy Gore selling his gruesome array of Charles Manson T-shirts and Jeffery Dahmer cook's aprons (Andy even brought along a two-headed kitten in formaldehyde and other sideshow oddities for the twisted among us). And I really liked Fun City's Michelle Myles and her old-time carnival whatchamacallit where you rest your chin on the top edge of a two-sided sandwich board to be photographed over the body of a tattooed man painted on one side and a woman on the other.

I remember back when the convention first started nine years ago. What with a recent legalization of tattooing in New York (after a 37-year prohibition), there was an incredible police presence. In fact, just to the right of the entrance to Roseland, I remember counting over two dozen neatly parked police motorcycles, side by side, in a line, stretching along the sidewalk all the way to the far corner! This year I saw a couple beat cops. That was it.

But what I did see were several police officers with very visible tattooed arms helping to direct pedestrian traffic over at the street fair on Ninth Avenue. As you know from previous issues of SKIN&INK, our other brave men in uniform, the noble firemen of this great city, proudly wear lots of impressive ink. Especially in New York after 9/11.

Sure, Roseland is a bit rundown and funky. But so is a lot of Manhattan. That's the charm of it. Ever since the Dutch bought the island from the Canarsee Delawares for 60 guilders and a slice of cheesecake in the 1600s, the city has been expanding, getting torn down and rebuilding again. Coming from California, where any multistoried structure built before the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 has either been torn down or fell down, it's an enormous pleasure to see historic architecture. Just to stroll down the sidewalk of any street and know that some famous poet lived there, a legendary painter lived there or a great actor lived over there is downright inspirational.

What with the tattoo moratorium that ran from 1961 to 1998, New York city has a little catching up to do in the longevity department. But it's closing fast. The enormous rush to open tattoo establishments on every block (tattoo shops even shared spaces with sunglasses stores!) has subsided, and the quality studios are prevailing. Mike and Mahai Bakaty's Fine Line Tattoo on First Avenue is kicking butt. Anil Gupta is still inking his miniature masterpieces on Fifth Avenue. Mike Bellamy is laying down some righteous ink at Red Rocket, and Michelle Myles has refurbished and runs two top shops, Fun City and Daredevil, on the East Side.

But the one constant is the tattoo convention. It's the clubhouse, where the world tattoo community checks the pulse of the business. Sure, the fact that this great New York show has 35 restaurants within two blocks of the place, the best transportation system in the world, Broadway shows, Tiffany's, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, street vendors, the Statue of Liberty, Dean & Deluca's, Katz's pastrami (better hurry!), dim sum, the Central Park merry-go-round, the Bowery and-. Hey, what did that real-estate salesman tell you when you were looking for a site to build your new tattoo shop?

"Location, location, location."

Ain't that the truth. A tattoo convention at Roseland. Hey, you just can't find a better place than that.