This past weekend Chel and I went up to Mendocino to attend my college room-mate’s wedding. We decided to go up a day early and stay in a Bed and Breakfast in Fort Bragg. We had an early dinner on the road and by the time we got into Ft. Bragg we wanted something light or maybe some dessert. The B&B was only a block or two from the older part of downtown; we found a little second-story bistro and had dessert. Across the street, we saw a tattoo parlour; jokingly mentioned to Chel “wouldn’t it be great if we got tattooed tomorrow?” She thought I was somewhat serious as both of us have had ideas for our “next” one for quite a while and answered with a prompt, “I will if you will!” On walking out, we walked by to see when they opened the next morning; it would be a little close and I took solace in that they might be completely book or just not take walk-ins. Back at the B&B, I took a chance at asking our very nice, older hostess about the tattoo parlour. She actually informed me that it was more than just a parlour, it was a “museum” and the artists were world-class and people came from far-off lands to get work done from them, specifically. I figured she was just trying to play-up her little town and repeating what one of her previous over-enthusiastic customers told her… or, if she wasn’t telling fish stories, we wouldn’t have any chance of getting a sitting.

The next morning, I did a search on the Internet and found the website for the Triangle Tattoo Museum. Looking over their site, it was clear to me that some of their work was good, some was so-so, but all-in-all they had the chops to do what we wanted. I scribbled up a couple quick designs to give the artist an idea of what we both had in mind and off we went. Triangle opened at noon, we still had to get dressed, had a 40 minute drive to get to the 3pm wedding; it would be close. We got there a little after opening and asked their intern if they did walk-ins. She looked at their book, saw an opening with their featured artist, PJ (think SNL’s featured players), who had just stepped out and he double-timed it back…. we wandered through the “museum”. I was pretty impressed; it actually was a museum, of a sort. They had a lot of older tattoo implements, old photographs, paraphernalia, and stories and details of the history of tattooing. I wouldn’t say it was anything approaching a world-class museum (it had the feel of something done in ones free time and a full-time curator would do wonders), but it was very nicely done and very informative and interesting.

When PJ got back, he looked over my sketches, wandered off, cleaned up the sketches a bit and came back with perfect stencils. He stuck them on each of us and went to work; Chel’s took about 40 very chatty minutes, mine took about 6… off we went to get dressed for the wedding with fresh ink.

After an endless drive down a dirt track (couldn’t expect anything less from Darrell), we wound up at a summer-camp style place. The wedding was held in a meadow and was quite beautiful; again wouldn’t expect anything less from Darrell. I was really happy to be there because I was able to catch up with many friends whom I hadn’t seen in a few years. Dinner was good, cake was tasty and the dancing was okay. All things considered, it was a good evening.