A British Man recently spent six hours getting a tattoo of Jesus worth £250 ($370) at a tattoo shop in Luton, England and simply walked out without paying. The artist who inked him said that the man claimed to have paid another member of staff, and then slipped away during the confusion. But here’s the real shocker – not only did he avoid paying for his Jesus tattoo, he actually stole an additional £1,000 from the store!

According to Red INC owner Joanne Baum, the man already had the words ‘Only God can judge me’ tattooed on the other hand. “The irony is that he clearly decided to embrace Christianity and the major ethos is ‘Thou shalt not steal,’” Baum said. “He planned the theft from us and he completely planned not to pay for the tattoo. To have someone sit there for six hours talking about their life intimately and then do this is unbelievable. He was there chatting about his wife and daughter, it is not acceptable.”

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When 29-year-old Didier Jacquemin set out to get the tattoo of his dreams, little did he know that it would turn out to be a huge disaster. While the image he desired was a beautiful forest scenery complete with birds in flight, the tattoo he ultimately got was the stuff of nightmares!

Didier, a resident of Liege, Belgium, said that he found the original pattern on the internet and immediately fell in love with it. So he printed the image and took it to a local tattoo parlor on January 15, asking for a replica. The artist agreed to do the artistic tattoo, but ultimately delivered something that seems drawn by a 4-year-old.

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While most proud parents hang up their kids’ art on their refrigerators, this Canadian dad has found a permanent way of celebrating his son’s work – by turning them into tattoos!

Keith Anderson, from Peterborough, Ontario, has been tattooing his son Kai’s drawings and doodles on his arms, ever since Kai was four years old. Now that Kai is 11, Keith has one tattoo to show for each year – parts of which were inked by Kai himself.

“Each one of these tattoos on my right arm my son has drawn over the years,” the proud father said in an interview with photographer Chance Faulkner. “The first tattoo is from when he was four; he is now 11. We add once a year from his drawing.”

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A Los Angeles artist is on a mission to cover her entire body with tattoos. She’s offering herself up as a human billboard by tattooing people’s names and designs all over her body, for as low as $10.

Illma Gore, 22, said that the initiative is a part of her ‘absurd and beautiful’ project called A Hundred Tiny Stories. She was actually trying to raise $6,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, in order to cover the cost of 60 hours worth of tattooing. She actually managed to raise a whopping $11,000, until the campaign got suspended.

“It’s art,” she explained. “It will annoy people or make them happy or make them smile. Either way, that’s what art’s supposed to do.”

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Attending a Tat2noiseact concert might just be the most bizarre experience of your life. The Belgian rock band is known for performing experimental music while simultaneously inking themselves, creating a freakishly surreal atmosphere that you won’t soon forget.

Their act starts with random screaming by lead singer Phil, while the band performs in the background. Then the members begin tattooing themselves or each other, and the screams get louder and more incomprehensible. As the performance reaches a crescendo, all you get to hear is the buzzing noise of tattoo guns, amplified by the sound systems they are plugged in to. At this point, everyone will seem to be in a sort of trance. There is nothing commercial about this unique performance, and you’ve got to have a taste for the bizarre to be able to relax and enjoy it.

“There is nothing conventional in our practice,” a band member proudly proclaimed. “Everything is spontaneous, accidental, according to our mood. This is the exact opposite of what happens in tattoo parlors. There are no rules, nothing is planned. No one would walk into a parlor and say – you can do anything, even dance.”

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Vin Los, a 24-year-old model from Montreal, wants to be the most famous man in the world. That sounds like an ambitious goal, but I’d say he’s taking way to seriously. Vin has actually tattooed the word ‘fame’ right across his forehead along with another 23 words  designed to make him stand out. The man’s face, neck and torso are haphazardly covered in an assortment of tattooed words and phrases.

If you’re able to ignore the tattoos, you’d notice that Vin is actually quite a handsome man with a perfectly chiseled body. Which is why I believe the tattoos are doing the opposite of what he intends – they’re actually taking away from his natural good looks. The fact that he’s covered his body with so many weird words like ‘lick’, ‘scream my name’ and ‘guilty’ is so unbelievable, that people actually thought the tattoos were fake.

So Vin recently created a video to prove that his tattoos were indeed real. In the footage, he is seen rubbing makeup off of his body using a wet rag, revealing the real tattoos underneath. His own name is revealed on his stomach in huge letters, along with words like ‘sex bomb’, ‘iconic’, ‘Tokyo’ and ‘New York’ on other parts of his body. He also has hair tattooed on his chest and stomach.

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Jay Freestyle, a South African tattoo artist based in Amsterdam, creates incredible, ethereal tattoos. And here’s the surprising bit – he works without a plan. It’s impossible to tell by looking at his work, but the 29-year-old inks freehand, making it all up as he goes. He works with only one motto: “Give me a piece of your skin and I’ll give you a piece of my soul.”

It doesn’t matter how many ideas you have in your head about your tattoo before you visit Jay. Once you speak to him and realize what he can do, you’re just going to turn around and say ‘Go for it, I trust you blindly’. So far, he has never disappointed a single client.

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Don’t let the bed bugs bite, is what we’ve always been told. But Matt Camper, an urban entomologist at Colorado State University, is doing the exact opposite. He’s gone and created a unique ‘bedbug tattoo gun’ – made of a jar, some wire mesh and thousands of hungry bed bugs. You simply invert the jar onto your skin, let the bed bugs bite, and later admire the pink, temporary tattoo they leave behind.

Camper’s unique invention will be featured on an upcoming edition of ‘Outrageous Acts of Science’ on the Science Channel. There’s a rabbit pattern on the top of the jar, through which the bugs are allowed to access human flesh. According to wildlife expert Ellie Harrison, it takes two hours for the tattoo to really show up on the skin. “Two hours after the bed bugs have fed, the inflammatory response really kicks in and immune cells will flood into the tissues from the blood, producing redness and swelling and heat,” she says on the TV show.

“Bed bugs feed exclusively on blood,” she said. “They find us via two sources. Firstly, they detect our body head, and secondly, they detect our carbon dioxide emissions. And they don’t need to be that close, they can be 10 feet away and still find food.”

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When 18-year-old Stian Ytterdahl’s friends dared him to get a tattoo, they gave him only two options to choose from – Barbie on his buttocks or a McDonald’s receipt on his arm. They’re both terrible, but I suppose you can’t blame Stian for choosing the latter.

“Some of my mates thought I had been a bit too active on the ladies front recently and wanted to punish me,” he said. “When we were in the restaurant on Monday, they said I had to tattoo a Barbie doll on my bum, or the receipt on my arm.” Incidentally, this is the teenager’s first tattoo ever, covering most of his lower right arm. There’s a large McDonalds logo at the top, followed by a list of items he ordered off the menu – a cheeseburger and four added toppings.

Stian, from Lørenskog in Southwest Norway, also said that his parents were not at all pleased with the turn of events. “I got an email from my dad that wasn’t entirely positive, saying: ‘What on earth have you done?! Do you think you are coming home with that!? Your mother has had a break down.’” Stian’s parents got to know about the tattoo from a report in the local newspaper and they were devastated.

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When Pastor Zack Zehnder flippantly offered free tattoos to his congregation, little did he expect people to actually take him up on it. During a recent sermon about acceptance at the Cross Mount Dora church in Mount Dora, Florida, the pastor had said: “If anybody would like to go out and get a tattoo of the logo of the cross that we have for this church we will find money and pay for that.” I suppose he didn’t realize exactly how popular tattoos are – at least a dozen church members have already inked themselves with the church cross logo.

Jeremie Turner, one of the congregation members who got inked, said: “We definitely took him up on his offer because if he’s going to hand out free tattoos, he’s got a crowd of people that’s going to accept them.” When pastor Zack realized what was happening, he graciously stuck to his word and personally paid for the tattoos at Bill Gold’s Tattoo Shop. “If I wasn’t so dang sarcastic in my sermons, I don’t know that we would be here,” he said, while overseeing a church member getting inked at the shop. “But we got some crazy people that have said they wanted to do it so I kinda gotta, I made the promise. I kinda gotta back it up.”

It’s nice to see  pastor Zack standing by his promise, instead of making excuses to try and get out of the deal. He even hopes that the new tattoos will serve as conversation starters and get more people interested in the church. “People’s perception of church has probably never been as negative as it is today and so if we can do something to kind of flip that script and interact with them and do something in a unique and creative way, we’re going to do that,” he said.

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You need to have a map at hand when you’re making travel plans. Most people prefer packing one in their backpacks, but this one guy chose to put it some place he can never lose it – his back. Of course, he’d probably have to crane his neck to look at it in the mirror, but at least it isn’t going anywhere, right?

59-year-old Bill Passman is a travel nut. So far, he has been to at least half the countries in the world, and to keep track of every place he visits, he had the world map tattooed on his back, and very time he visits a new country, he has it colored by a tattoo artist. So far 60 different countries are colored on his back, and the rest are waiting to be filled.

Surprisingly, the lawyer from Louisiana only began travelling recently – at age 51, when he got his new passport. His first trip out of the country was to Tanzania and he has never looked back since. In 2010, he quit his job in order to travel full time. That was the year he got the tattoo as well. He travels most of the year, only returning home for about three months. While his adventures have taken him to all the seven continents (yes, even Antarctica), his favorite place is Guatemala.

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Now here’s a guy who literally ‘faced’ his fears. To deal with his morbid fear of spiders, Eric Ortiz got a black widow spider tattooed on his face.

You’ve got to be either really gutsy or really stupid to put something so huge and permanent on your face. I’m not sure which one Ortiz is. The 24-year-old from Deltona, Florida, said: “Everybody fears spiders. That’s why I got it. Just to, like, make me know, that that’s what I fear, but not to fear it. You know what I’m saying?”

I’m not too sure I know what he’s saying. How can putting a spider tattoo on your face make you less scared of spiders? Well, it’s his face and if it works for him, who am I to judge? But a lot of people are judging Ortiz for his rash decision. “Everybody looks at it like, ‘Damn spider’ ‘cause if you’re going around your house, you know what I’m saying, you see those spiders, you’re going to jump, so putting one on my face, I say you know what, I’m going to see what people think.”

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Newsflash! Carl McCoid– the guy who transformed his body into a shrine for Miley Cyrus, has added 6 more tattoos of the controversial singer to his collection, totaling an impressive 21 inked inscriptions and portraits. Last time we saw him, he “only” had 15.

Back in august, after the VMAs, Miley was harshly criticized for her borderline-obscene performance and revealing outfit, but super-fan Carl was very supportive and understanding, saying that “I don’t like the criticism she is getting. She doesn’t deserve it. It is all part of her comeback,” and adding that Miley is all grown up and that she is just “being true to herself now.” Carl, whose obsession with Miley tattoos started after his divorce, was also very flattered to hear that the singer mentioned him in an interview, stating that “She gave me a couple of seconds of her mind.” In the interview, she said that she didn’t like his tattoos and that he should “start another sleeve with my new look.” As the obedient, obsessed fan that he is, Carl went on and got himself inked with portraits illustrating her new rebellious look and lewd attitude as well as with lyrics from her songs, adding a total of 6 tattoos to his collection.

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For the past 20 years Houston-based Larry Da Leopard has covered his entire body with over 1,000 leopard spots to achieve his goal of becoming a “manimal”, part man, part animal. He refers to himself as The Leopard Man.

Larry says he started getting tattoos with his friends in a time when skin inking was considered taboo, as a way of acting rebellious, but he never stopped. Even after covering his entire body, including the years and private parts, with tattoos, he considers himself a work in progress. He constantly adds new leopard spots wherever they still fit, and retouches his older ones if they fade after prolonged sun exposure. Although he says his parents cried the first time they saw his face full of permanent leopard spots and admits they make him look like a cartoon character, Larry is proud of the way he looks and likes showing off his skin art in public. He often goes out wearing only a Tarzan-inspired loin cloth and an animal-print coat, and hands out fliers for his tattoo parlor to passers-by.

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If you’re going to get a tattoo, why not go for something truly beautiful instead of the usual tribal, heart, dragon or those tacky Chinese characters that people seem to love so much. Five years ago, French tattoo master Xoïl aka Loïc adopted a new artsy style called the “Photoshop Style”, which really gives “skin art” a whole new meaning.

Xoïl was born in a very small village in Southern France, where his father worked as a mason, creating beautiful things out of stuff other people just threw away. Watching his father at work inspired him to leave the rural life behind and start making cool stuff himself. He never had a formal apprenticeship under a tattoo artist, because they all had these “old-school crazy ideas” he just didn’t recognize at the time, so he simply hung out at tattoo shops picking up the basics and developing his unique style. And it shows in his current artworks. Xoïl’s style is so distinct from other skin artists’ that you can recognize one of his pieces on sight. Combining clients’ ideas with stamp-like textures, typewriter-inspired fonts and geometric patterns, the French master creates incredibly beautiful works of permanent body art that have caught the attention of tattoo enthusiasts around Europe and the US.

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